The SLUSHPILE Blog

If you go to the Double Edge Press Homepage, you’re going to find something missing. We’re down one title.
Although we still retain the rights to Shall Die by the Sword by T.S. Beckett, it will no longer be available in print. We’ve yanked it from distribution.
99% of this decision was due to lack of sales, […]

Yesterday I blogged about Joel Rosenberg’s Dead Heat and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series. Although both of these series are pointedly religious, I designated them into the more general category of disaster books.
Both of these series deal with the End Times as related in Bible Prophecy and the disasters that occur during […]

As some of you may recall, I have been reading Joel Rosenberg’s Dead Heat. This is the fifth (I think) book in an end times scenario series of books. It has many similarities to the popular and groundbreaking Left Behind series, but where as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins tackled the return of Christ from […]

Secondary Characters are characters that are going to reoccur throughout different scenes in your story, but whom the story is not focused upon. They require a lot less description than main characters, but you still wish to give each their own unique features and mannerisms. This aids greatly in helping your reader to keep the […]

The amount of description each character receives is going to be based on how large of a role they play. This is not to say that lesser characters get short-shrifted: you as the writer need to sum them up succinctly and memorably.
But we’ll focus on main characters first. In the beginning of this Descriptions Series, […]

Today we’re going to talk about highlighting a plot development detail or event by description.
A plot development detail or event is something that you want to ensure your reader doesn’t miss. This is going to require you to tighten the focus of your description onto this detail or event. How you do this is going to […]

Descriptions in a dialogue scene are a prime opportunity to give your reader a closer look at the characters, both physical attributes and, maybe even more importantly, how they interact with each other.
The reason this is a prime opportunity is because it stands to reason that as one person is conversing with another (or others, […]

Yesterday under the post titled Descriptions, I gave a general overview of what to do and what not to do with descriptions, and how to present them in different portions of your writing.
I really don’t have a priority list, so we’re just going to take them in the order I summarized them in yesterday.
That being […]

The second thing I look for in writing after character development (aside from story–because the story RULES and that takes precedence over everything) is description.
Description is such an integral part of your story that it should go unnoticed and blow the readers mind simultaneously. This is possible through what I like to call ‘absorption’, where […]

I’ve talked a lot about ‘the story rules’. So much so, in fact, that you may have gained the impression that the writing doesn’t matter.
Well, it does.
So now that I’ve drilled into your head that good writing isn’t going anywhere without a good story to write about, let’s move on into where the writing fits […]