Tales from the Circle

  Rules and Myths about Reviews   You can find a lot of book reviews on the internet, but you know what you find even more of? Rules about reviews. Every other day there’s a twitter thread with hundreds of comments or a goodreads discussion with passionate arguments from reviewers, readers, and authors. The majority of these rules are based on very strange myths and assumptions so I wanted to take some time to work through my thoughts on them.   Authors Shouldn’t Read Reviews of their Own Books This “rule” is thrown around by both authors and reviewers. Sometimes it’s mentioned kind of jokingly: “Well, I went and read my reviews, but I really shouldn’t have done that” and sometimes it’s taken with such seriousness as if it’s some kind of serious and unbendable rule.   Personally, I don’t understand how this is even possible to acheive. I’m an author who spends a considerable amount of time on the internet and the number of reviews I actually have is very limit...

I usually think of planning as a matter of personal preference. And I often see others asking “what kind of planner are you?” Or “Are you a plotter or a pantser?” But I’ve recently started to realize that the amount and type of planning I do for a novel is not dependent on me, it’s more dependent on the story itself. Planning a fantasy novel is significantly different from planning a sci-fi novel, for example. That much is obvious to me. But even within these different genres each individual story needs a different type of planning. I’ve written a few novels now, only one of which has been published so far, but I’d like to look at the type of planning I did for each one. Children of the Dead City - Epic Fantasy ( Published ) This novel takes place in the fantasy world I’d been building for about 15 years before I wrote it. It’s actually the second version of the same story. I wrote an entire novel that focused on the character Hawk (but his name wasn’t Hawk back then) and...