Musings of Two Creative Minds

For just about all writers, the choice of voice or perspective to use is always a challenge.  Although many write in the third person voice, there are two options.  Do you do 'limited' where we only know what's going through one characters mind, or do you use the 'omniscient' version where the readers get to know what's going through everyone's mind at the same time, even if the characters are not sharing all their thoughts with each other. I did the 'limited' third person point of view in my first two novels.  However I kept changing who's head we were inside with each chapter, giving a nice build up and differing points of view.  So in the new novel I'm working on  "The Vampyre Blogs - Coming Home" I wanted to try 1st person perspective, but still do multiple points of view.  So, with my wife's advice, I chose the same method Bram Stoker used to write "Dracula".  He did 1st person from many different points of...

Since I started work on my first vampire story, I decided to see what other stories and variations have been done on the vampire myth already.  To this end I pulled out an anthology book of vampire stories that's been in my possession for about 20 years now. Everyone is pretty familiar with the works of Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer, and of course Bram Stoker.  But what about other authors who've tapped into this vein (I know this pun sucks... but so do vampires ba-da-bum).  This collection can be a huge help to any author with plans on attacking this famous mythos by giving them a chance to see what others have done before them.  I know I found it helpful and enlightening. THE PENGUIN BOOK OF VAMPIRE STORIES is one of the best anthologies I've ever found.  Part of the reason is that it covers authors who've touched on this subject as far back as 1816 and goes up to 1984.  There are a number of familiar names in this book like Clark Ashton Smith,...

Yesterday, against my better judgement, I started writing a second book.  Now I'm still working on "The Ship" which is the sequel to my first novel "The Bridge".  But I was having troubles with "The Ship".  I was making progress, but it was so slow I was going crazy at times.  I would write over a 1000 words in one day and then dump about half of them because they weren't moving the plot along or really helping develop the characters as much.  I kept what did seem to be working and built on that the next day.  Sometimes this is one way of dealing with Writer's Block for me. Then yesterday, something else happened.  An idea for a different book that is part of my Para-Earth series started gelling like no one's business.  It had sat on the back-burner for so long now it was boiling over.  Scenes and characters started coming to life to such an extent I had only one of three options: A) Start writing the book B) Leave it alone and hope I ...