…the artist just dropped this nifty piece of quest artwork onto the Facebook page. Check it out!
A nice taste of things to come 🙂
URL is here: http://www.dragonassault.com/
Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Dragon-Assault/461417370535039
Feast your eyes on this!
I’ve written some content for this upcoming RPG, which is soon to be released as a beta for Facebook and on the web. I’ve seen some of the other artwork for it, and it’s absolutely GORGEOUS. Do yourself a favour and sign up for the beta, this world is amazingly detailed and I reckon it’s going to be lots of fun.
More info here:
I’ve said it before, I like to live my life as a warning to others. Those of you who have aspirations of becoming a professional writer, gather around and hear my tales of woe.
It’s great to work in a creative field, even better to get paid for your efforts. Having a second income is not the reason I got into writing (payment for art is its own contentious issue which you should wade into at your own peril) but finance becomes a fact of life once you’ve been doing anything for a while.
Save your receipts (especially if you’re going to conventions or awards nights). Set up a detailed spreadsheet of how money’s coming in, and where it’s going out. Get an ABN if you’re in Australia. Keep on top of your invoices, politely chase up any money that’s been a long time coming your way, and of course, always pay your own bills on time. Be wise as to what you can claim for a deduction.
I’ve been writing since 2001, and making money from it since about 2004. This is the first year I can honestly say I’m on top of my financials, and the lodging of a tax return wasn’t all that painful. Don’t be a dickhead like me, be organised from the get go 🙂 even if you’ve only got a dribble of money coming in at the moment, it makes good sense to get into practice. After all, you ARE running a small business. And most small businesses get themselves into trouble through disorganisation and lack of forward thinking.
Thus sayeth the Fisch.
For those coming in late, I was fortunate enough to take a six month sabbatical from my employment, with the assistance of an Arts SA project grant and all of the leave I could scrape together. I became a hybrid stay-at-home-dad and a full-time writer. Went through all of the cliched agonies and tribulations that accompany this creative lunacy.
I approached my writing as a job, with deadlines and productivity goals. End result, I came up with approximately 2 novels worth of new material in that time. My grant novel “Papa Lucy and the Boneman” was jolted into its lurching, horrific life. Several write-for-hire projects were vanquished, and in the latter half of 2011 I was one busy beaver.
So what I have found interesting is this: I now cannot enter my study for fun. There was a time when I would quite happily sit in that room, looking at my brag shelf, enjoying the collateral of my writing career. There’s laurels in yon study, and I enjoyed resting on them. This would be followed by a lot of faffing around online (“research”), maybe a game or two, and eventually some writing.
No longer. The moment I walk in and sit in that chair, I feel like it’s game on. Any faffery tends to be done on the iPhone now, or the laptop. It appears that 6 months of strict discipline is not so easy to cast aside. Just an interesting observation!
Bad habits, we’ve all got them.
And that’s okay 🙂 when it comes to the bad habits in one’s writing, you are in the unique position where you get endless do-overs. Before you release your brain-babies into the wild, you get to carve, polish and refine them to your heart’s content. The flip side of this is, you are almost always too close to your work. “A face that only a mother could love” most definitely applies to artists and their creations, perhaps moreso.
With that in mind, when it comes time to tweak your writing, my advice is this: identify your weaknesses. Find the ways that you frequently break the rules, look at lazy habits that you might have gathered along the way. Case in point, I know that I’m shocking with passive voice, throw cliches around like confetti, and my endings almost always have to be thrown out and rewritten. But right after typing “THE END”, that creative post-coital glow sets in, and like everyone else I can see no wrong in my child. I’m a genius, it’s perfect, and naught need be changed.
BOLLOCKS. I’m as awful as I’ve always been, and committed almost all of the writing sins I swore off last time. My recommended process is to go off, have a cuppa, hell, take a week or two off if I can. Stuff the hubris and ego back under the stairs. Then I look at my slab of word-vomit with fresh eyes, and unleash the editing chainsaw. Next step is to find that Achilles Heel, and carve it up like Leatherface.
“Just a second, I’m in the middle of this edit.”