I’ve talked about some of my favorite books before and what they taught me. At this point, I don’t know that I can honestly say I have a favorite author. I’ve read too widely at this point to be able to single out an individual and say they’re my favorite. I’m more likely to focus on one technique or skill and say they do this thing well.

So I suppose that’s what I’ll focus on here. A few authors I like and what they do well. Because all these things they do well are what inspire me to upgrade my own writing skills. So here are a few authors I admire and what I admire them for. Keep in mind these opinions are my own and I neither can nor will excuse any bullshit they pull or believe on a personal level. This is just about the writing.

Robin Hobb - Endings. Holy HELL can Hobb write endings that are satisfying. And I mean that for books and for whole series. I’ve read the Soldier Son trilogy multiple times, and each book is so well contained but the whole series is wrapped up well, too. And then there’s the expansive multiseries series The Realm of the Elderlings. Not only are each book and each series wrapped well, but the final ending to the whole epic is just… epic. I cried so hard, so emotionally sated that I almost couldn’t handle it. Hobb makes it bittersweet but easy to accept the goodbyes readers say to characters, especially ones we’ve traveled with across years and many many books. I’d kill to be able to write an ending one-tenth as satisfying.
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That said, the beginnings aren’t as gripping. Many of them start very slow and take some settling into. But once in, if you’re not hooked, then please don’t force your way through. Every book isn’t for every reader. That’s why we have variety. But if you want a good ending, go for a Hobb book.

Matt Dinniman - Okay, to be fair, I’ve only ready his Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, but I do have others in mind to read eventually. But from DCC, I can say this man is great at having things happening behind the scenes and revealing them in fantastic ways. He very much keeps in mind that “onscreen” characters aren’t the only ones with agency, and he makes forgetting it your problem. Anything that seems to come out of nowhere has inciting seeds ages ago that you just dismissed because it didn’t directly affect what you were seeing as a reader, especially if it’s through the eyes of your POV character. Dinniman is great at keeping you informed of the small details of things as you need to know them.

I guess I’m also going to mention a small personal gripe I have with each author, so here we go. And oh, is this a total nitpick on my part. So trivial it annoys me that I’m annoyed by it. Dinniman as a couple technical word choices that I can’t help but notice and get a tiny spike of annoyance at the repeated use of the word. The main one is the word “upon.” He uses it instead of the more simple “on” a lot more than anyone else I know. And it seems… so out of character for the narrator, Carl, to use that so much. Similarly, he uses “as” phrases really often. I haven’t gone and one any sort of analysis of how often Dinniman does both these things, but it’s enough that I’ve noticed them both. Might not have noticed if it weren’t for listening to the audiobooks, but yeah, I’ve noticed. Like I said, tiny gripes.

Stephen King - I mean, obviously, he had to be in this list, right? Put simply, King has some great ideas and expands on them well. His beginnings are a lot more gripping than Hobbs’s, that’s for certain. His first line for The Gunslinger is often touted as like the quintessential, simple, gripping first line. That said, once King gets to a certain point, all sense of direction and conclusion just sort of… stop. Often, it’s not until the very last few pages of the book. I’ve read a number of King’s books and… I’m just never satisfied with the endings. So I guess for him, the gripe goes hand-in-hand with my praise. The man has fantastic ideas and really ramps up the conflict to dangerous levels. But it’s always felt to me like he can’t dig his way back out and just… ends things because he’s done trying. 

Let 2026 begin! Here’s where we stood at the end of December.

D&D Single Adventure - Still working on actually getting everything written down.

Short Story (working title “Recalled”) - started this right after Christmas and have a working outline and about 1800 words written. Just need to poke the words more into place and see how it actually turns out.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Chugging along and still enjoying! Not a lot to say other than the outlining is progressing. I may be getting close to wrapping up the outline (probably in another month or two, based on the pace I’ve been going) but there will be a lot of filling in details so I might need to go back over things before I start writing it in earnest.

Current chapters in Draft Point Five: 35 (up 7 from last month)

There’s a whole lot of variety in my naming conventions, and sometimes, it varies depending on the story world I’m creating. I was working on a project (that I still may get back to someday, who knows) where the naming conventions for classes were very distinct. Nobility used nature names as part of their culture, mostly because they were certain in their dominance over the world. So you’d see names like Chrysanthe, Quartz, Cirrus, and Mesa. The commoners didn’t have that arrogance in their naming conventions, so I went with more “traditional” fantasy-style names. I did a lot of what I normally do for fantasy: modify normal names.
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Modifying more common or normal names in fantasy is pretty standard for me, as I mentioned. It can be as simple as changing a vowel in an existing name: for the main villain in Criminal From Birth, I just changed the e in Brent to an i, and we get Brint. It can be changing a beginning or ending sound. Silas, with a different ending, becomes Silen. Kerry drops the y, becomes Kerr, becomes Cair to make the pronunciation a bit easier to get right when it’s only read. I’ve seen the name Monica in a book changed to Ronica, and it’s beautiful.

There’s also always the Pern version of blending names. It’s the same sort of blending that get used with shipping characters: you just mash the two names together. In Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, children are most often named a mashup of their parents’ names. So F’lar and Lessa have a son named F’Lessan. Grab your parents’ names and rename yourself. I could be Kenry, Mareth, Manneth, Kary, or even Marketh.

Honestly, those are my favorite ways to name characters: the letter/sound substitutions or name mashups.

I’m also not above just putting my friends in books, either with their actual name or modifying them. And it doesn’t have to be just one change. Hell, go a few steps. Take a name, find a foreign language variation of it, and riff off that. Like, if you have a Henry, turn it to Enrique, and start messing with that. Spell it phonetically. Onrikay. Drop a sound. Rikay. Make it easier to read. Rickay. Change a vowel. Rackay. Suddenly, Henry is unrecognizable, but you have a usable name.

The point is, it’s no holds barred. I’ve seen unusual and unique names on people in real life. Celebrities names their kids all kinds of weird stuff. So find what you like and name your character that. Just… if you’re naming a real person, give that knowledge some consideration. They have to live with the name. It’s not like naming a pet.

Uh… where did November go? I got some stuff done, but this month really took a toll on me. In-person D&D has picked up, so a lot of my focus has been there.

D&D Single Adventure - Holy cow, ideas have abounded. I currently, as of now, have scenes outlined for two. Just need to write out the details, do test runs, tweak anything that doesn’t work right, and format before I can release them!

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Chugging along and still enjoying! Not a lot to say other than the outlining is progressing.

Current chapters in Draft Point Five: 28 (up 8 from last month)
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I haven’t gotten any flash or short fiction going this month, mostly because a lot of my working time has gone to D&D prep and chainmail.

Oooh, this one sounds like fun. I have a fair few published works, so let’s just go through the list, shall we?
Empeddigo - This was inspired by two ideas:
The idea of a highly communicable disease used to exert power and control over the mass population.
A genre blend of science fiction and fantasy

The Trials of Hallac - Oh, my epic poem. This was largely inspired by the challenge itself of writing a 5000-line epic poem in 31 days, but my plot and story inspirations were The Odyssey, the thoughts of something similar to the Trials of Hercules, and… Final Fantasy Tactics.

Mere Acquaintances - This was originally referred to as “The Blogject,” because I wanted to write a story that was intended to be released in unedited, first draft form as a serial, sort of an homage to serial published authors like Dickens. I honestly don’t recall exactly how it was inspired, but I always described it as “A bunch of people in a mental institution have multiple personalities. And those personalities are delusional together.”

Starsigns - This novel is one that probably went through the most permutations. It was inspired in large part by Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son Trilogy of novels: Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, and Renegade’s Magic. I loved her premise on birth order being formative for your role in life and wanted my own take on fighting the fate decreed for you. It was originally intended to be much more adult than it was, but I’m quite proud of the final product.

Criminal From Birth - There is no denying that this had a single source of inspiration: the movie Basic, starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. It’s a story told and retold a few times with new details revealed by different tellers, so it keeps changing just how events are reacted to, uncovering the mystery one layer at a time.
I’ll admit I did not pull it off as well as I liked in Criminal, but I’m still pleased with it. Obviously. I mean, I wrote a sequel and will be planning to wrap it up with a third book.
That’s right. I’m not making any promises on timelines, but that’s the long term hope. Book 2 is with my editor, so we’ll see when that gets finished and book 3 happens.

The Deadly Studies - I didn’t have a whole lot of say on inspiration for my novella series, since it’s a spinoff of John G. Walker’s Statford Chronicle series. It’s obviously inspired by a need to fit into the established world of its parent series. By dint of having me write it rather than John himself, it is already set in a Grappin-style flavor, making it a totally different experience than reading any of the Statford books. John says I more than did Luc justice, so I’ll take that with pleasure.
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Subscription: Life (work in progress, working title) - This is my current main project I’m outlining right now, a LitRPG novel that I hope will either be a standalone novel, or at most, a two-book series. A lot depends on how long the outline itself is and how the prose ends up. But this is inspired by the fact I’m a lifelong gamer and have been reading a lot of LitRPG stuff lately. Notably, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman has been an obsession and huge influence.
S:L is not at all going to be any sort of DCC clone, though. I’m more original than that, at least. And like a lot of other projects that have been started and discarded, no promises that this one will come to fruition. I hope, though.

October was very stressful in a lot of ways. I knew it would be, but it took its punches and didn’t pull any. So very lean month as far as writing is concerned.

Dungeons & Dragons: Bard Campaign - Just because it’s more personal and low-priority than other projects, and it involves the involvement of others, this will be the last regular update on this campaign.

D&D Single Adventure - I have two concepts I’m mulling over and trying to pick which one I want to be my first focus. I think I know which, I just need to do it.
Criminal from Birth sequel - Still with editor.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Chugging along and still enjoying! Not a lot to say other than the outlining is progressing.
Current chapters in Draft Point Five: 20 (up 2 from last month)
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I’ve also gotten blog posts and writing exercises done, and I’ve got something new coming for all subscribers you’ll see starting later this month!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It was intended as a challenge to writers to write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel in 30 days, specifically in the month of November. That’s 1,667 words a day, if you average it out between the 30 days.

I am not here to discuss the goods or bads of NaNoWriMo, nor to discuss any scandals around its organizers or anything like that. It’s over now, and it was what it was at the time.

This blog post is simply for me to put out my experiences with it, what I took from it, and so on. Any opinions and experiences are my own. I will say upfront that I don’t participate any longer and haven’t for years, but I think you’ll understand why by the end of the post.

I first learned about it in the summer of 2009 and decided I was going to go for it. Knowing my writing habits and tendencies at the time, I knew right away that the word count wouldn’t be the challenge; finishing a story would be. At the time, my finished/unfinished ratio of projects was awful. I did (and still often do) struggle with around the 2/3 - 3/5 sections of writing. I’m great at buildup and setup, and I’m not bad at climaxes, either. But the last push to story crux and the denouement are some of my weaker parts of stories. At the time, I was pretty purely a pantser. That is, I just wrote by the seat of my pants. It wasn’t so much that I wrote myself into corners as I lost interest trying to solve problems rather than cause more.

So I knew going into fall and eventually November that I needed a plan. I needed to try something I hadn’t done before: outlining a project. I would need a map so I didn’t write like 37,000 words and then peter out because I was bored and didn’t know where to go. No, I needed to know where I was going up front.

Long story short, now I’m a huge supporter of outlining. I still allow myself a fair amount of pantsing while doing the writing, but that’s details. I’ve already done a 3-post discourse on my outlining process as it is now, 16 years later, if you’re interested.

Outlining Post 1
Outlining Post 2
Outlining Post 3

Suffice it to say, I’m currently using that method right now, working on the outline for my LitRPG novel, working title Subscription Life.
I digress.

Over the course of the late summer and early fall, I outlined a novel. Come November 1, I started writing it.

I hit the 50,000 word mark on November 9th.

I’m not kidding. I remember it quite vividly, even now. I also recall that there were 3 days I didn’t write at all. I legitimately wrote 50,000 words in 6 actual days. There was still wrapping up to do, some outline left, and I did end up finishing the novel in whole.

That novel was my first published one, Empeddigo. And oh, how I do cringe thinking about it now, but that’s the way with early works. I revised and published it the following year and was poised to NaNo again in 2010.

Over the course of the next couple years, I was a NaNo fiend. I even did NEpMo, which was a random challenge I found in the same vein. That one was to write a 5,000-line epic poem in the month of May. Pretty sure I did that in 2010 as well. That was my second book, The Trials of Hallac. Also pretty cringe, but what are you going to do?

So through 2010, 2011, and 2012 for sure, a lot of my writing life revolved around NaNoWriMo. I went to local write-ins and loved them. The atmosphere was always great, writing sprints were a fun mini-challenge, and it was great to be surrounded by other writers. We’d talk about our projects, hover over our keyboards side by side, and got to know each other a little.
But foremost, it was about the word count.

And that was where it became a problem for me.

I’m VERY driven by numbers, in a lot of ways like I am driven by words. Math is a game. Numbers and words are both toys I use in different ways, but damn do I obsess about them. My drive became in getting higher word counts faster. I made the first week of November a regular staycation so I could just write. I made a big pot of chili the last day or two of October and lived off that while I secluded myself to knock out thousands of words. I strained to break 20,000 words on NOVEMBER FIRST. Never quite made it, but I got close a few times. 10k word days were no stranger to me.

I believe one year, I actually finished NaNo on like day 5. But it got worse. At least twice, I DOUBLE NaNo’d, as they say. Meaning I wrote 100,000 words in 30 days. I even went for a triple NaNo but ended up running out of material. I finished the book draft.

In general, I wouldn’t think such a thing was a problem. I was eating and taking care of hygiene. I went to work on time, did my job, and took care of life outside the word processor.

But I eventually came to the realization that while yes, I was cranking out words like I was running out of time, they weren’t good words. Sure, that’s what editing is for. But damn, was I paring down a LOT. Tons of fluff, unneeded description, rehashing of the same thought or idea, repeated description, meandering conversation. Yes, I know I just did exactly that in the list of things. That’s the point.

I made all those things in search of that ridiculous word count.

I was focused purely on quantity, not on quality.

I could do better, I decided. And that’s when I realized I’d gotten everything I could out of NaNoWriMo. It was great reason to write, but there were also a lot of people who wouldn’t write anything UNLESS it was November, and that wasn’t the best practice. All the wrong lessons there.

I recognized fatigue in myself after that frantic writing, too. Often, I didn’t write another word until the January after, or maybe even February. That was no way to practice a craft.

So I absolutely think there is value in writing challenges like NaNoWriMo. I learned a lot about writing, my own writing tendencies and habits, and how I can function under stress and deadlines. And I did make some amazing words in all that fluff. There was just a lot of the fluff that had to be pulled away. It was the quality I wanted, and if I focused on that, there was no way to hit NaNo for me without being even more stressed. I learned a lot from NaNo, took what I learned, and let it go.
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I used to be a guy who did NaNoWriMo. I outgrew it, and that’s fine. 

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, and I suppose it’s finally time to do it. I’m sure I won’t express the complexities of my opinion well here, so I have to ask for some grace. Also, I want to point out that my opinions are my own, and I’m a flawed person just like everyone else. I cannot and do not think of everything, so I’m sure there are plenty of nuances of this subject that I am ignorant of.

That all said, here’s my thoughts on AI, especially with regards to writing/creativity in general.
It has a place, but generally speaking, I do not think it is art. That goes for AI-written words and AI images.

I don’t want to turn this into a bitter discourse about how so much energy and water are wasted stealing words and art made by actual people, though that is a major concern of mine. It’s cruelty spawned by capitalism and the self-destructive nature of humanity.

There are applications of AI that I am floored by. The possibility of it helping do things like identify cancer early.

Most of my problems with AI are really problems with capitalist applications. Maybe it can be attributed to my lifelong love of science-fiction. I’ve seen and read so many stories of it being used for altruist things: assisting people in everyday chores and even critical medical or scientific analysis.

My gripes are really those of any creative: our work is being stolen, and soulless derivatives are flooding the world instead. It’s not how we’re supposed to live.

What’s even worse is that people like myself are having our written words and artworks judged as being AI-generated when that’s completely untrue.

I know I’m really only repeating a lot of things that have already been said on the subject, by people much more eloquent than I am.
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More than anything, I want to make it clear that I do not use AI in my works in any capacity. Not for writing, plotting, editing, polishing, cover art, or any other part of my processes. And I never intend to.

Ah, the writing version of the chicken or the egg question, huh? Which one spouts in me first, the characters or the plot? I can answer this in one word:
Plot.
But if I left it there, it wouldn’t be much of a post, would it?
So let me delve into it a little. I kind of tangentially touched on this sort of thing a little when discussing my outlining process, but not in any significant way. I really only discussed coming up with significant story points for plot and characters, as a way to help mesh all the arcs and plot points into a cohesive whole.
I would say that 90% of the time, plot is what strikes me first. Ideas tend to be “what if THIS situation?” And that’s what spawns action from me. It’s usually one of two things that gets the idea into my head: either the initial plot hook or the crux of the conflict. For my current main project (working title Subscription Life), the plot is absolutely what sparked the idea. Had nothing to do with characters. That said, once I started creating the characters to go into the story, the plot ideas molded and reformed some to fit the people that would be in the world of the book.
That’s honestly pretty much how it goes for me. The little notebook I have where I jot down ideas is predominantly plot-hook type ideas. “World where,” type premises, or the basic description of a situation. Sometimes, it might even be something as simple as a line of dialogue or idea for a cool location. Sometimes, it’s elements of worldbuilding that strike me first. I guess in some ways, you could count that as a character, if the world is particularly central to the conflict of the story.
On those occasions that the character is the main inspiration for me, though, it’s pretty much never in a way that really makes the character a formed being, so to speak. It’s flighty, and more often a thought like, “the one person in the world who” kind of idea.
More often, though, the plot idea comes first, followed pretty quickly by the character idea. Like in Starsigns, the concept of a culture where your whole life’s path is determined at a fortune telling was immediately followed by the “what about the person who doesn’t have a fate?”
The whole book sprang from that.
Since it’s my current project, a little deeper insight on this subject as it pertains to that specific project. It might interest you to know that my main protagonist was the last main character for me to actually figure out the plot arc for. To be totally honest, that actually scared me a bit. Once I had the basics of the plot arc, I formed my main team of characters: the protagonist and a trio of friends. The three friends’ character arcs came about really easily for me. I won’t spoil things, but in short, I easily managed to basically flesh out the overarcing whole plot just from those three supporting characters’ story arcs.
Like, the whole story. The climax was set, some subplots and all had their place. But the protag was just… a shadow. A placeholder. How could that make sense? Was the spot I had for this Main Character (MC) really even necessary? If the whole plot made sense with just the three friends, shouldn’t one of them be the MC?
I almost went with that thought. Except for one thing that wouldn’t leave my mind: the trio’s stories lacked a real tie. The plot itself lacked its unifying factor:
The MC.
The story needed her. But if all the main conflicts were resolved with the characters I’d created, how did they need her?
They needed a spectator. But that’s boring. No one likes a protagonist who doesn’t take action. I’ve read books where the MC is reactive, even to the point of everything they do has the reasoning of “well, why not?” Those characters do nothing, offer nothing to the reader. There is no service they provide other than to be a vessel for the world to happen to them.
My protagonist couldn’t be this way. She needed more. She had to be at the center of things, actually taking action. She had to be the final piece of the final conflict, the bit that made all the difference and resolved everything. She had to be the ending.
Once I realized that and found out where she fit at the end, it was actually sort of easy to trace her path back to the beginning.
It was odd, honestly. I’ve never had an ending come together before everything else. But oddly enough, it’s the last half of this book that formed first. Normally, I get the first 2/3 easily and the last 1/3 is harder to plan.
I’m very eager to see how this project shakes out in the end. And I really hope this thought process persists to future projects. It’s actually made it really easy for me.

September has been a month of a lot of insanity in all realms: professional, personal, and beyond. I still got writing done, somehow.
Dungeons & Dragons: Bard Campaign - Session #7 fully planned. We haven’t played session 7 yet. In short, no update.
D&D Single Adventure - No progress, which hurts, but I said in July I was kind of waiting to see how modules run for me so I can get a better grip on what others would expect from a written adventure. I’m three sessions in with my first module one-shot coming at the end of October. I just need to get down to it and write.
Criminal from Birth sequel - Still with editor.
LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Chugging along and still enjoying! Not a lot to say other than the outlining is progressing.
Current chapters in Draft Point Five: 18 (up 10 from last month)
New Short Story (My Stories) - Same as last month. I got some work done on it, but not enough.
I also did write a handful of future blog posts (trying to get and stay ahead) and started on the 10-minute writing exercises. I’ve done three of those already.