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Posts Tagged ‘Writing Process’

GLAWS Writers Conference

Wow, did we have a good time at our first writers conference! Orion flew to San Francisco to join Kyros (and see his new house), then drove down to Los Angeles for GLAWS, the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society Conference. Panels were mixed for us. Some were on things we already knew. Others had us furiously taking notes. One had us write from a prompt, then read it out loud. We both enjoyed that one, since we write stories from prompts every week. (Some of them are the short stories we’ve posted here on the blog.) The speakers at lunch-time were interesting and we made some new contacts. The only problem arose on Saturday and Sunday, when the air conditioning went out. It was in the 90s all weekend and the windows were painted shut! We all suffered together.

All in all, it was a very interesting experience. We’ll probably do GLAWS again next year. With us living in two different states, it’s hard to coordinate our schedules to attend one.

A Glimpse Into Our World.

We’re hard at work on Book 2: Running to the Past. But we thought we’d share a little behind the scenes of what it takes to write a book like Dreaming of Xeres.

First, you would be amazed at the research we did during the writing of the book! Sometimes we’d spend days researching (aka: down the rabbit hole!) before we had all the pieces we needed for a scene or chapter. Some of the areas we researched were:

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Musings On A Journey

The idea for this series had been knocking around in Kyros’ mind for about twenty years. When he lost his job, he asked his husbands if he could be the house husband and try his hand at writing a novel. He had always loved to write, and had a degree in Technical Communication. He’s a really good idea person and editor but didn’t think that he could write well enough to publish. He came to me and we worried the idea over about two months, creating characters, magic, the guilds, the entire world frame for the story.

When we finally started writing, we put in six to eight hours a day for between five and seven days a week until we got the first draft done. We had characters show up that we hadn’t planned for and finished with a completely different ending than we originally plotted. We set up a Facebook page for our series and a forum site for readers and characters to play in. That led to us creating over a hundred characters profiles to play with there so we could use their posts in the story. (Hard work, but fun!) When we were done, we let it sit for a few days, but both of us found we didn’t know what to do with all our suddenly-free time! It was like going cold turkey on caffeine or sugar!

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