July 5, 2015

10 things you need to know about beta readers

"Hi Ksenia. I need your advice on finding BETA readers: 1) How/where did you find reliable ones? 2) Which draft do they get to read?"

Awesome question, Zandile. I wrote a couple posts about beta readers, one about adapting your novel to beta readers' feedback and another about luring them with cookies, but it's time I write a new one as I've learned a bunch of new things since then. So if you have decided to start looking for beta readers, here is what I suggest you do.

1. Do you really need feedback?

Ask yourself if it will help you or hinder you. Sometimes when you're just starting out, negative feedback can cut you pretty deep, so deep, you might want to stop working on your book or quit it altogether. It happened to me a couple times. I was open to the point of turning my guts inside out and shlepping it all online for everyone to see. I'm a pretty tough cookie and can handle criticism well, but in a couple instances it got under my skin. Ask yourself, "Am I ready for someone to tell me my writing is shit without an explanation?" If not, then don't do it. Write in a vacuum until you think you'll be able to handle it and not pay it much attention, still writing the way YOU write and still forging forward regardless of what people tell you.

June 13, 2015

7 ways to describe your protagonist in 1st person POV

by Ksenia Anske

Leo Zaccari asked: "What is the best way to describe your protagonist in 1st person POV?It always sounds forced and unnatural. What are some good ways to do it and make it sound natural?"

Excellent question. I think there are as many ways to do it as there are writers, and ultimately you will find your own way. I have accidentally stumbled on a couple tricks while writing my first book, and later I have seen other writers employing other tricks and stole those and tried them in my books as well.

May 31, 2015

I have discovered Lovecraft

by Ksenia Anske

These pages, the pages I'm reading, they're breathing. Although I have only read 3 of Lovecraft's stories so far—Dagon, The Statement of Randolph Carter, and Beyond the Wall of Sleep—each of them takes me out of the room and into a world that is so unlike anything I've ever read that it makes me feel uneasy. There is something of gothic romanticism, and something of classic horror as penned by the Stokers and the Poes and the like, yet also something of dreamy fantasy and a bit of "emotional" sci-fi that is not so much scientific as it is cosmically subconscious, the inner nucleus of thought thrown out there into the void of infinity and beyond. Of course I have only begun and haven't even gotten to the thick of the Cthulhu mythos, but Jesus Fucking Christ, what a man, what a time, what a tale.

February 11, 2015

My creative process, or why it's important to be naked

by Ksenia Anske

So Tina Mailhot-Roberge asked me about my creative process. "How do you come up with ideas for books? Do they come up naturally, from beginning to end, assembled in your mind? Or do you need to brainstorm a while before a story forms? What's your creative process?"

Well, let's see. I strip naked and climb on my neighbor's roof and, flinging my post-babies boobs (they look more like shaved rabbit ears), swear at the sky both in Russian and English until either a bird craps on me and makes me shut up, or lightning strikes me and I go up in in flames, or an idea falls out of a cloud on my head in the shape of a brick and I end up writing from hell. You know, dead, but still writing. Really, this is my creative process. Okay, I forgot to say I drink hedgehog blood every morning. And at night I sleep in a sock drawer. Socks keep my skull warm, because there is no brain there, as you can see from all this nonsense I just wrote and you read. Why you're reading this, I have no idea.

January 28, 2015

How I launch my books: I DON'T

by Ksenia Anske

Shocker! Not what you expected to hear. Ana Elisa Miranda asked me this question, about how I launch my books. I thought about telling you that I strap them to a seat like Laikas and hurl them into space on board of various Sputniks. I also thought about the idea of chucking them into bushes out the window or, an amusement of a more gregarious variety, tossing them on people's heads from a high balcony and see what they say.

That was me not being serious. This is me attempting to be serious.

I don't launch my books. I really don't. I swear.