Recently author/podcaster Tee Morris’s wife Natalie died unexpectedly, leaveing Tee struggling with the personal and financial burden that comes with the sudden death of a loved one. I don’t know Tee well enough to give you any more details, but I can tell you all that Tee Morris started this whole podcasting fiction thing. He was the first. He has been a pioneer in making the internet one of the greatest tools at the disposal of writers everywhere.

I’ve mentioned The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy on my blog before and I can again recommend it for Tee’s interview skills, insights and slightly strange sense of humour. Tee gives all of this stuff away for free, and now he’s in need of some help from the community he was a big part of starting.

That’s us.

So here’s what I want you to do. Go to the widget at the bottom of this post (when I do another post I’ll repost it there) that says Chip In or go to the Chip In page to help Tee out with the immediate costs he’s going to have to deal with. I say immediate costs because there is also going to be a trust fund set up for his daughter, but he will need help now.

Once you’ve donated, post a comment for me so I know when and how much you’ve chipped in and at the end of each month (Up until April) I’ll select someone at random and buy them one of Tee’s books from Book Depository. They ship free anywhere in the world, so feel free to enter no matter where you are.

You get an entry no matter how small an amount you donate.

It sucks when bad things like this happen, but we can all help out a little, and as a community, help out a lot.

Go to it.

****UPDATE**** If you want to keep the amount to yourself, I don’t mind at all. Just let me know you donated and I’ll put your name in the hat!

I have new review up, and if you’re an author looking to make a living getting published, you need to check it out here.

This is the first book I’ve given a 10/10 score to, because of the huge impact this one book can potentially have on your career.

I took a few days off writing.

I know this is one of the cardinal sins of NanoWrioMo, but it couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t personal tragedy, or even terrible work schedule that got me into trouble, it was lack of structure. As just about anyone who knows me can tell you, I’ve gotten pretty good at writing the first two to three chapters of any given book. I can also do you a decent short story.

Problems arise when it comes to the Big Swampy Middle*. As much as anything it’s that I have no idea where things are going, so I don’t know what to make my characters do. I’ve been doing seat of the pants writing for a while, and it’s not really working for me. My last effort, the Shadow Library, had a couple of really good chapters.

The rest was an abomination against all things.

It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it was close. The problem was I had nothing to hang my story on, nowhere really to go. So I have recently been sent Larry Brooks guide to story structure and I’ve pent the last few days studying it properly. This will probably lead to me failing NanoWrioMo, but I don’t care because the plan is to get a better book out of it. There will be a review up of Larry Brook’s Story Structure – Demystified up in the next week or so, with a detailed look at how I applied it to the new project.

Which, you might have guessed, is called The Downside of Being Dead. I can’t tell you to much about it, except that I’m enjoying writing it, and that there are dead people walking around in it.

Right, I need to do some writing, because I’ve been a terrible slacker. If you need some better advice on writing than I’ve been able to give you in the last few weeks, I can’t recommend either Mur Lafferty or Carrie Heim Binas’s respective blogs enough. Listen to these ladies, your writing will be better for it. Mine is.

*With thanks to Jim Butcher for the term.

I’m running it close to the wire here. Four days to go and I’ve still got 10,000 words to hit my target of 50,000 in one month.

Even to reach this I’ve had to count everything I;ve written this month, including the words I’ve deleted.

It still counts.

Quick Tip:

Stuck for story idas? Look through the Google search terms people used to find your blog. My favorite so far is “freaky mace games.” If that was you, why?

You also inspired a short story, thanks.

But really, mace games?

I’ve just finished reviewing Phil Rossi’s awesome novel Crescent. If excellent sci-fi with a horror twist tickles your taste buds then check out the review right here.

I’m a little behind.

Right now I’m sitting right on 22,000 words for the month. I’m planning a fairly epic writing day tomorrow to catch up to my target and then keep on going. In that 22,000 I’m counting almost 16,000 words that I wrote…. and then deleted because they were in fact, very bad. I do still have them on my hard drive, but they sit in the darkness alone and unloved.

The write is actually going very well though. I’m doing horrible, terrible things to my main character and that’s the way it should be. If your main character isn’t suffering in some way then you may need to make them suffer more. A great writing quote from screenwriter Martin Roth: “Chase your characters up a tree and throw rocks at him, to see how he responds.”

It’s a great quote and god advice, but personally I recommend also setting the tree on fire.

Not only should your main character be the person with the most to lose, he should also be suffering to keep it. That’s what grabs my interest as a reader, I want to know just how much your protagonist is prepared to give to keep what he loves. Grim anti hero’s with nothing to lose are fine, but they;re only interesting when they are threatened with pain and loss. No one cares about the emotionless killing machine, they can make a good villain (although they’re even better when the villain too has something to lose) but in the end your audience must root for your character to win, you first have to have something to lose.

This turned into a much bigger post than I was intending. Perhaps I need more beer….

Please don’t answer that. My stupidity is already well documented.

So, after putting down The Shadow Library and getting geared up for the next novel, I’ve also been planning to do NanoWriMo. Initially my plan was to do the 50,000 words NanoWriMo asks of its authors and then write the second half of my story in December.

Utilizing the remaining memories of what December as like last year I deem the chance of writing 50,000 words in December to be minimal. I think I’d be more likely to win a large cash prize of some sort. Or be savaged by a rabid wild boar.

So instead of hitting 50,000 words in November and December, I’m going to start NanoWriMo a month early and start my new novel today. I’m going to try to get a post up every few days to let you all know how it’s going.

I’m fairly sure this means I won’t be eligible to claim a win under NanoWriMo rules, but at the end of two months I’ll have another first draft to play with.

I think it’s worth it.

I wasn’t going to post anything on this, but my Grandfather, Dr Hamish Neale, died early Thursday morning. He was 95 years old and the most awesome person I have ever known.

He was 95.

I’ll always know him as Gramps, and my memories of him are sacred to me. Not a month ago he quite literally gave me the blue bird of happiness. It looks a lot like the Twitter bird. The reason I’m saying all of this is that Gramp’s life was full. He helped thousands of people, raised a family, spoiled his grand-kids and still found time to write his own poetry and study Shakespeare (he got in the odd whiskey and All Blacks game too). His life has inspired several stories, and his death has inspired another one, which I’ll start after my current work, Downside (working name) is done.

I know all writers take from the world around them for their stories, and I feel that death should be included in that. At first I felt guilt that my brain immediately spat out a story for me when I got the call to say he’d gone, but after some contemplation (and a much appreciated cuddle from my girlfriend) I realized that I have been training myself to think that way.The most comfort I could give myself during the horrible, stomach dropping feeling you get when one of those calls comes in, was to spin a tale in my mind where Gramps wasn’t gone, just changed.

We tell stories, at least in part, to shed light on the dark places in our world. Without stories we don’t know who we were, who we are or who we’ll be tomorrow. Gramps was my inspiration from yesterday, he helped make me who I am today, and tomorrow I hope I can show people how great they can be by seeing his example.

Rest in peace Gramps, thanks for all the stories… and for the bluebird.

I’ve just put up another book review of Seth Harwood’s Jack Wakes Up. Just click on those funny coloured letters with the line underneath and enjoy!