Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Craft (Page 3 of 4)

Another Upgrade

July 16, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finally finished the read through and edit of my latest novel and began putting the changes into the Scrivener project.

My normal workflow once a story is finished, is to run it through Pro-Writing Aid to catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling issues. Then I print out and do the read through mentioned above.

I use Pro-Writing Aid as a desktop app, and when I opened it there was the message – upgrade available. So I upgraded. The desktop app is still there but in addition, I now have ProWriting Aid Everywhere.

I left Everywhere alone for a week or two because my guess was this upgrade required a learning curve. And boy was I right.

Being able to pull up ProWriting Aid without leaving my Scrivener document was a huge plus. Potentially, it lets me combine two steps into one – make the edits, check with ProWriting Aid. Done!

Except not exactly.

The integration works well in Word and Obsidian. Not so well in Scrivener. The first thing I noticed was all the spellings I added to the ProWriting Aid dictionary were gone and there didn’t seem to be a way to recreate them. Perhaps not much of an issue when writing a contemporary story, but a real pain with all those Babylonian names and places.

I finally found the dictionary in my online profile and added the words, but I used to be able to do that directly from within the app.

I can absolutely see the advantages of having ProWriting Aid available without having to leave the application you’re writing with. It’s just going to get longer to get used to, and understand the nuances, than I thought.

A Pleasant Surprise

July 8, 2024 /

Late last week, I took a pause in my current work-in-progress to look for a piece of writing that fit in with the work, and which I was sure I had scribbled down at some point in the past.

I have two Scrivener projects I use for notes. One is called Thoughts, and the other is Writing Projects. Thoughts really is for random jottings, notes and ideas. Writing Projects was originally conceived as a placeholder for new story ideas. Some things still get in there but not quite in the way I envisioned initially. I find it easier now to set up a complete Scrivener project and drop all the thoughts in there as they occur to me.

As you’re probably gathering, I didn’t find what I was looking for in those Scrivener projects. Where else to look?

Quite often I’ll take a scene or situation from a larger story idea and write a sort story covering that incident. I didn’t think I’d done that in this case, but worth a look inside the Scrivener project that stores all my short stories.

I still didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find a completed three-thousand word short story that, according to the timestamp, I wrote about four years ago. The characters have appeared in other stories so they were familiar. The story itself not so much. I looked through my submissions log, and found I had never submitted the story to an editor, which made sense as I couldn’t find a proper manuscript document anywhere.

The piece of writing I was looking for remains elusive, but it was a nice surprise to discover something from the past – something I wrote and forgot about.

I’m wondering how many other stories I have that are like that.

Thrill Ride – Gadgets

June 10, 2024 /

If you didn’t support the kickstarter for Thrill Ride, the latest issue Gadgets, is arriving on June 21st. I don’t have anything in this issue, but I’ve seen some of the stories and it’s another great anthology.

I can’t tell you to hurry before all copies are gone, because it’s an eBook! However you can get it here where you can avoid the rush: Thrill Ride.

You’ll be glad you did.

Heallreaf 5 is Here

June 3, 2024 /

I’ve written before about my sister, Margaret, and what a talented weaver she is.

As well as winning many awards, and allowing me to use her work The Alchemist’s Dream as the cover for my book Mageweaver, Margaret is also the driving force behind the conception and continued success of the Heallreaf exhibitions.

Heallreaf started as a small affair at West Dean College in 2015 and has grown each time to Heallreaf 5 with showings in three locations in the UK starting on June 29th at Weston Park in Shropshire. I won’t make it to the Weston Park location, but I am looking at one of the other two – Morley Gallery in London in December 2024 or Farfield Mill in Cumbria from January to April 2025.

Morley Gallery will be easier for me from a travel perspective, but Farfield Mill is just a stone’s throw from the English Lake District. The Lakes have some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and it’s a very, very long time since I’ve seen them so that may be the tie-breaker.

If you get the chance, take the time to visit Heallreaf 5 and the creations of some of the best weaver’s working today. You won’t be disappointed.

So Bad It’s Compelling

May 28, 2024 /

Have you ever sat down to watch a TV show or movie, or picked up a book, and in the first few minutes said: this is terrible, but you persist anyway?

This happened to me recently. I was surfing the dozens of channels on my subscription and complaining about how there was nothing to watch.
Not quite true, but I’ve never been into a dozen home shopping channels or following the exploits of housewives in this week’s target city. It was also that time of the evening when movies I might be interested in are well under way, and my cable provider is very unpredictable on which shows get the restart option.

I never thought I’d say it out loud, but there are times when I miss Comcast and Xfinity. Anyway, after the third cycle through the channel guide, I settled on a movie called Trailer Park Shark which was just starting.

Yes, you did read that correctly, and a couple of minutes in, it was about what I expected. “This is awful,” I said more than once. Despite that, an hour later, I was still watching. I may even watch the movie again because there must have been something in the way the story was told that kept me in front of the screen.

I’m sure there’s a learning opportunity there, and techniques I can use in my own writing once I figure them out.

First Person or Third Person

May 6, 2024 /

Toward the end of last week, I finished the latest Jacob and Miriam novel. This is the fastest I’ve written a novel, but not the reason for this post.

I write the Jacob and Miriam novels in the third person, and the Jacob short stories in the first person. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write that way, it just happened.

Once the novel was done, I put it aside and turned my attention to a short story – at least I think it’s a short story. It may turn out longer. It’s a Jacob story that came about from a throwaway line in the story A Cousin’s Outing that appears in the Thrill Ride issue Sisters in Arms.

In that story, Miriam makes a comment about a past event, and Gideon makes it a condition of his help to hear the full story about the event.

At the time, I had no idea what that event was, how it came about, or who was involved.

Well, the subconscious mind is a strange thing, and over the weekend, I opened a new Scrivener document and started writing about that event. After about 400 words, I came to a slow stop. Something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure what it was, so back to the top and reread from the beginning. As I did so, I found myself changing the viewpoint. With my head still deep in the novel, I automatically wrote Jacob in the third person. As I cycled back through the first paragraphs, I changed from third person to first, and then kept writing.

Because I started late in the day, I didn’t really expect to hit my daily word count, and was quite surprised when I looked up and had blown past it. I don’t think I would have been anywhere close had I persisted with Jacob in the third person. And I even have a title. Keep your eyes peeled for Unwelcome Competition!

iPad Revisited

April 8, 2024 /

It’s nearly two years since I wrote about my iPad purchase in the Brave New World post (May 2022 – Richard Freeborn).

In that post I talked about the keyboard, and how, without email I was able to be quite productive. I am still using the iPad for writing, usually with Scrivener because that’s where my fiction lives these days, but there are a few differences.

About six months ago, I bought a Macally bluetooth keyboard. It’s a full size keyboard with a separate numeric keypad. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that numeric keypad until I had it back again. Another feature of the Macally keyboard is the ability to connect up to three devices and switch between them seamlessly, with just a quick hoy-key combination.

It was very easy to connect the keyboard to the iPad, and much as I still liked the Magic keyboard, being able to sit and type with the correct posture was wonderful. It’s on these occasions that I make use of the separate iPad mouse, which to be honest doesn’t get much other use.

What I haven’t managed yet on the iPad is a heavy editing session where I have two or three or more chapters open in panes on the screen so I can make updates and corrections – like putting consistency into hair or eye color. that’s pretty easy to do on the Mac Mini with a 20+ inch monitor. Not so easy on the iPad where you don’t have the ability to pop out and rearrange documents. To be fair, when I get into those big editing sessions, there’s usually a pile of papers strewn across the desk as well!

Overall though, I’m still very pleased with using the iPad as a dedicated writing device for places away from my office. And I’ve still avoided configuring email!

A Quick Update

March 4, 2024 /

For those of you who supported the Thrill Ride kickstarter, a big thank you from me, and implied from everyone else with stories in this year’s issues. The kickstarter funded, so expect to see the first issue – Sisters in Arms – within the next few weeks. This issue includes my story A Cousin’s Outing.

It’s been a while since I submitted anything to the top science fiction magazines, but I have stories under consideration at Asimov’s and Analog. Unfortunately at the moment Fantasy and Science Fiction isn’t accepting submissions, but when they open again, there will be several stories in the queue for them.

Elsewhere, I’m making good progress on the third Jacob and Miriam story, and that’s on track for publication at some time in the second quarter of 2024. More news on that closer to the publication date.

A New Approach

February 19, 2024 /

This past week my writing study and reading intersected in a way I didn’t expect.

I’m coming to the end of a nine-week class on dialog, and wow, has it been illuminating. In parallel, one of the fiction books I was reading was Beyond – the first of Mercedes Lackey’s trilogy about the founding of Valdemar.

I enjoyed the book but something felt off, and not quite right. I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Not then, but later when I finished working through the lectures on the dialog class, I had a glimmer of an idea.

This week’s topic was narration, and how a writer can use it to give the reader information, and to paraphrase, there’s light narration, heavy narration, journal narration, and whole book narration. The assignment was to find examples of each type.

And there was my answer. Beyond isn’t just heavy narration, the whole book is mostly narration, and that was what disturbed me.

The thing with whole book narration is it tends to keep the reader at a distance, and I wasn’t expecting that from Mercedes Lackey. When you read the other Valdemar books you are deep inside the character’s head feeling their thoughts and emotions, and I kept waiting for that in Beyond.

I read the book almost in one sitting and know I’ll go back and read it again, so although I wasn’t expecting this approach, I suspect the next book in the series – Into the West – will have the same style.

This time I’ll be ready for it. And probably read the book in one session.

All in the Mind

January 23, 2024 /

Over the past week I’ve written two short stories with the intent of exploring a new science fiction world. I was reasonably happy with the first one, but something didn’t feel right about the second one.

That second story was a murder mystery and I laid out the death, the suspects, and the resolution. The story ended up being a little shorter than I expected, but that wasn’t what bothered me. If I’ve learned one big thing in the past few years, it’s that a story will be as long as it needs to be. There have been multiple occasions where a story I thought would be about 3,500 words ended up being nearly 5,000. And some I thought would be 6,000 words ended up at 3,000!

I had someone read the story, Someone with much much more experience thanI have, and whose opinion I respect. Good writing they said, but you lost me when I realized there was no setting.

Wham! Nailed it in one!

When I reread the story, I knew exactly what they meant, and I realized why the story ended up that way. I had a vision for the location and setting – a tropical beach on a planet somewhere in the Milky Way – but I didn’t see it. For example, as I was writing, I didn’t have a feel for what the restaurant looked like, how the tables were set, the attitude of the wait staff, the views from the windows, the smells coming out of the kitchen. All those little things that make the story real for the reader.

I thought about the story a lot during my walks this past weekend. I still like the premise of the mystery, and the implied potential for other stories in that same world. I’m thinking I’ll write the story again, from a different character viewpoint, and see what happens to it. It will be a month or two as first, I have a novel to finish.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Richard Freeborn

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑