Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 12/19/22 Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 12/19/22

Ten More Writing Prompts: Christmas Edition

Every so often, I like to challenge you, my readers, to take a break from your projects and flex your creativity on something smaller.

So here is a Christmas edition of my ongoing series, Ten Writing Prompts.

Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 10/17/22 Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 10/17/22

Publishing Pathways: Non-Traditional Publishing

At its best, non-traditional publishing fills a niche and provides a useful set of services to aspiring authors. Rather than selling the rights to your work in order to have a professional team polish and distribute your work, with non-traditional publishing, you pay a fee to have a professional team polish and distribute your work in order to keep your rights.

Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 10/10/22 Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 10/10/22

Publishing Pathways: Traditional Publishing

There are a lot of nitty gritty details about what different publishing deals can look like with different traditional publishing firms, but it boils down to this: the firm pays the author to purchase the rights to the work, and the author and publisher negotiate a rate of royalty that the author will be paid for each book sold.

Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 10/3/22 Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 10/3/22

Publishing Pathways: True Self-Publishing

With true self-publishing, if you don’t already know what you’re doing, it falls on you to figure it out. Thankfully, there are a lot of resources online you can lean on to help you cure your own ignorance, but this pathway has good and bad elements that you should be prepared for.

Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 9/12/22 Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 9/12/22

Back in the Saddle Again… Kind of

It’s finally fall—at least, culturally speaking. It’s important to get back to practical posts. Not to insinuate that reading fiction can’t help you get better at writing, but it seems a good time to get back to what I originally intended this blog to be: Advice on the craft. What little I know offered to you in the most appetizing way I can plate it.

Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 5/26/22 Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 5/26/22

Fear Itself

I rarely feel like I can conquer my fears; often the best I can manage is to coexist with them under a tenuous cease-fire. So what do I do?

Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 5/16/22 Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 5/16/22

Ten More Prompts to Get You Writing

Here are ten more prompts. You can use these to begin a writing journey, or you can use them to give your brain a rest from a project that has you pulling hair out. You can use them to try a new genre you don’t normally write in, or to get some extra practice in your preferred genre. You can share the resulting work or keep it to yourself. Just write.

Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 5/4/22 Sam "One-Wheel" O'Neil 5/4/22

A Case Study on Theme: Beauty and the Beast (1991 vs. 2017)

Obviously, any great work of fiction can have more than one theme, but there is usually one central theme that any other themes hang on; a trunk from which other themes can branch. The themes of 1991’s Beauty and the Beast deal with prejudice, freedom, love, and forgiveness. And the 2017 remake fumbles basically all of those. But none more egregiously than the “trunk” that made ‘91 so great.