Original Image from Unsplash, created by Redd Angelo
Words added by Erin Penn
So I am reading along in the The Weird Wild West anthology by eSpec Books, going through the “about the author” section when I ran across a book title that intrigued me: “The Six-Gun Tarot“. Saw the author was R.S. Belcher and went to read “Rattler”, the short story in the anthology. Not bad, not bad. From there the search went to Amazon to see if the blurb intrigued me as much as the title. It didn’t, but I fooled around a bit (because BOOKS!) and discovered the just released (March 2016) book “The Brotherhood of the Wheel”. Picked the sample up on my Kindle and two days of fighting myself later about dropping money on a new book when I have so many other books to read, write, and edit, I bought the book.
Templar meets Teamsters would be my tagline for the book.
And the next day I run across Mr. Belcher as a new blogger on Magical Words! His “The Great Pants-Plot Comprise” captures one of the many answers to whether plotting (figuring out everything in advance) or pantsing (writing with the flow) is better … and is perhaps the closest to the answer I would provide if anyone asked me how I approached the question.
Flash, which I do a lot of, is a pantsing project; write about 1,000 words quickly. But the novels take a bit more work to be coherent. By nature I am a plotter. Plan life, plan trips, etc. Lists, lists and more lists. Pieces of paper everywhere.
I like the blog because Mr. Belcher tells about two failed novels, one because he approached it from a plotter beginning and the other from a pantsing beginning. Then he found the mix for him. Read about it here: http://www.magicalwords.net/r-s-belcher/the-great-pants-plot-compromise/.