MattBooker.info

If you haven’t already, go have a look at NaNoWriMo II: The Revenge – Day 1 so I don’t have to do much of a recap.

Screw it, here’s the recap! Back in 2009 I did my first participation in National Novel Writing Month over at nanowrimo.org. Every November they get people from all over the world to attempt writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It’s madness, and a topic I’ll cover in a later post.

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Hello again, dear readers.

Some of you may find yourself asking, “Matt Booker, what’s going on?”

Maybe even, “Y U NO POST MOAR?” or “What does purple taste like?” and “Weren’t you writing a book?”

Those answers and more, after the jump!

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For those of you who’ve been wondering why the site’s been down for a couple months (and why there hadn’t been a whole lot of new posts before that), remember that book series I was working on for the last few years?

The first book is done being written and I’m working with an editor and illustrator for it. Yep. Close to 150,000 words and should be fully illustrated. I’m not going to say much about it in this post, but suffice to say if you’re a fan of the blog I think you’ll get a kick out of the book.

MattBooker.info is back. Sort of. Something screwy is going on with the database and I’m working on getting it fixed. I’ve just got to go through and re-upload all the images.

So you’ll have access to the guides again soon. :)

And with my new host comes unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage space. So no more small pictures linking to imageshack! Images too big for the format of the blog will either be linked to on imageshack, or they’ll be linked to on here.

Hope you all have been well.

~Matt Booker

Writing a book can inspire very strange conversations, especially when that book isn’t centered in reality as we know it.

The reality of the book should have its own rules, for what is reality if not a consistency of experience, the blending of the physical and metaphysical into an established congeal of, well, everything.

A book does not offer a totality of a world, but a glimpse into it. And that glimpse should be consistent. You don’t have to lay the ground rules for everything, but you do have to lay the ground rules for everything the reader is going to glimpse. And in doing so, you must also lay the ground rules for things the reader may never even think about, but those things must be established because firstly they give a truth to the things the reader does see, like how an iceberg is very real and seen above the surface only because of the existence of the bulk of it below the waves.

And second, who’s to say where the readers eye may wander?

The writer guides, walks a fine line between hand holding and herding, but you can’t put blinders on the reader. A good world, a true world, is one established well beyond the boundaries of where the story is actually written.

And so a good story doesn’t excuse inconsistencies by saying, “A wizard did it!”

Unless a wizard actually did.

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