Musings of Two Creative Minds

  When I started out on this writing journey, I never saw myself as someone who could a whole bunch of writing projects going at the same time.  That kind of thing was reserved for some of the great prolific authors like Isaac Asimov, who was notorious for working on multiple projects on a regular basis.  The man insisted on having a portable typewriter or two wherever he went.  And if he couldn't get his hands on a typewriter, he'd pull out a pad of paper and a bunch of pencils/pens and wrote the old fashion way, long hand. But me, I could never picture myself even thinking about working on more than one story at a time.  In fact, the very first novel I started working on was set in the early 1800's and I had gotten about 2/3's of the way through the tale when my wife pointed out that a historical piece would be harder to market.  On hearing this, I gave it some thought and put the story aside and began a whole new piece which eventually turned into my fir...

And I'm back, sort of. Okay, I'm still a bit unwell, but finally on the mend. In the meantime let's continue with that discussion about some of the things I learned putting together our first anthology. First off it was somewhat easier than creating an entire novel. With a novel you have to keep track of so many things like character development, interactions, subplots, pace of the story, etc.  Now with an anthology, you still have a lot of stories to contend with but each one is self-contained and has its own beginning and end. You don't have to be worried about how they fit into the main tale. Plus you can have a greater variety of characters and give each tale a flavor all its own. Sounds pretty easy so far right? Well, here's where things started to get a little more complicated for me.              Like a novel, an anthology does need to have a certain feeling of cohesiveness to it. There must be some facet or factor ...