Sheila's Guests and Reviews

I've spent a while playing with my Snowflake Pro software and my first Hemlock book. It's going pretty well. So, for those friends who've not met the Snowflake Guy ( Randy Ingermanson ), here's a few notes... 1. The software downloads and installs really easily - always a plus. 2. The welcome page has a neat diagram of a snowflake, and quick explanation of its relevance to writing a novel. Basically, the idea is that your novel has a beginning middle and end - three sides, like a triangle. If you add a triangle sticking out from the middle of each side, and another triangle sticking from the middle of each resulting side, etc... you end up with a snowflake. Meanwhile you're adding ideas to your one-sentence summary and turning it into a novel. 3. There's access to lecture notes and a spoken lecture at each stage of the program, to help you know what you're doing and why. And Randy's a really good speaker. 4. So, after doing the basics - title, genre, au...

No; it's not snowing outside. In fact, at the moment it's not even raining though it was five minutes ago (this is Portland). But there are snowflakes growing in my computer and if my writing's somewhat incoherent it's probably due to the shock of finally starting to get organized. I went to a writing conference a few years back and one of the speakers was Randy Ingermanson. He was really good - a fun speaker, with lots of great ideas, very down to earth and practical (unless you count his ambition to achieve Total World Domination, but perhaps that's not impossible either.) One of his very practical suggestions was a talk about the Snowflake method of writing a novel. It appealed to me - reminded me of teaching Snowflake curves to elementary school-kids back in England. And it made great sense as a way to grow an idea into a novel, with all the details of character and plot filling themselves in along the way (along the edges) - the perfect solution to my meanderin...