For the past couple weeks, I’ve been working on a second draft. It’s going slower than hoped. Part of it is that the first draft — which I dictated and transcribed — is a mess. I can live with that. I’m just glad the first draft exists. It took me only two weekends to produce. […]
Category: Process
A new narrative frame
The old frame Dearest friends, brave souls all, please lend…umm…an ear. For I sing to you the song of Sir Aliyah, Knight-Errant.First Among Equals in the Order of the Frilly Garter.Most Cherished Champion of Her Royal Highness, the fairest and most kindly Queen Gwennifer.And who am I who presumes to be worthy enough to tell […]
Thinking through the narrative frame
What follows is a raw version of fairly recent thinking on how to settle on the best narrative frame for the story. Maybe have Lester be a motormouth — who admits that he “talks a lot” when he gets nervous. Right there, I have the seeds of a running joke. Whenever he starts monologuing, the […]
First draft done
I just got back from a two-week hiatus. My shitty first draft has been marinating in a series of mp3 files. I dictated the entire first draft using a Sony voice recorder. Now I’m transcribing the audio files using a nifty piece of software called MacWhisper. Once the transcriptions are done, I’ll copy and paste […]
A first peek behind the curtain
I write in Google Docs & Scrivener. Google Docs is where I brainstorm and journal. When an idea grows into a premise, I move it to Scrivener. Here are a couple screenshots for the Scrivener “Project” I’m using for the medieval comedy fantasy. The working title is Sir Aliyah, Knight-Errant. As you may know, the […]
Editor’s top 3 premises
The editor I hired on Reedsy choose the following 3 as the most promising of the 10 middle-grade novel premises I shared with him: Premise #6: Four Square Premise #9: Parental Abduction Premise #10: The Sad But 100% Completely True Tale of Lester, Court Jester, as told by his Faithful Cousin Sir Aliyah, Knight Errant […]
10 novel premises challenge
Two years ago I joined this novel-writing course at The Novelry called Write a Novel in a Year. At the time, I was waffling between two projects. The first was a retelling of Cinderella called Spiderella. You can probably guess the premise from the title. Instead of a princess, her fairy godspider transformed Spiderella into […]
Advanced base camp
Hello! Some of you may know me. Others, not so much. Allow me to briefly introduce myself. My name is Sean Miller. I’m American. 53 years old. He/him. The “Dr.” above is from a PhD I earned a decade ago at the University of London. My research explored the role imagination plays in the production […]