Beth Hudson's Blog

When I was in junior high, I read Asimovs Foundation Trilogy. I absolutely loved it. I re-read it multiple times throughout the years, and each time I marveled at Asimovs tight plotting, culminating in the triple punch of plot twists at the end of the third book. What made this work for me was the fact that one of those twists was solidly set up at the very beginning of the first book, the other two at the beginning of the third. As a result, though the curves were unexpected, they made...

Beta readers, workshopping, editors, agents, publishers – so much advice for your work, and so much of it contradictory! One says your work is too slow; another says you need more description. One says you need to pare down your prose, another says your description is too sparse. Emulate Hemingway. Emulate George R.R. Martin. Emulate Agatha Christie. Emulate Tolkien.How do you please all your readers? Do you just ignore everyone’s advice? Do you try to take everyone’s advice? How do you...

It was the middle of 2019. I had a major event in September, and I’d been really hoping to finish my book and get it out in print by then. I’m not a fast writer, and it was difficult, but I was making headway. Then I decided to take a preliminary word count, just to get an idea of how long my book would be. I figured I was getting fairly long, and maybe it would run 120,000 words.My estimate was over 180,000 words.Just to translate, given a standard book page, that would run over 700 pages. I...

There are so many things people want out of a book or story, but one of the most crucial is a satisfying ending. Without that, everything falls apart, and readers are disappointed.That seems simple enough. But what, exactly, is a satisfying” ending? Is it ‘Happily Ever After?’ Is it ‘everyone dies at the end?’ Is it deus ex machina? Is it genre determined? How does a writer know what sort of ending to give to their work?On the surface, the answer seems obvious; a satisfying ending is one...

I was talking with a friend who wants to do some writing, and he said to me, “I can’t start writing until I figure out all of the worldbuilding. I still don’t know how the Fae magic works, and I need to get those details down or I can’t begin.”Since I only had a couple of minutes to reply, I bit my tongue and didn’t get into the discussion I wanted to start. Still, it frustrated me. It was obvious from our chat that he felt he wasn’t allowed to go any farther before writing, not that he wante...

I was revisiting an author’s meltdown from a few years ago, and honestly trying to figure out why someone would put a book out into the public and expect only positive reviews. I got caught at one end of this dynamic a couple of years ago when I left a two-star review on a book I had high hopes for, and the author tracked me down in email and asked me to remove my review. That was more than a little bit freaky. I didn’t back down, and luckily the author left me alone after that one contact, b...

“How do you know so much about sailing ships?” the editor asked me.I stared at them in confusion. “I looked up 17th century merchant sailing ships on the Internet.”I had written a short story which took place on a trading ship, and I knew almost nothing about them, so I did what I thought was the obvious thing – I looked it up. But then, sometimes I miss the obvious – I’d forgotten that I’m the daughter of a reference librarian, and grew up with a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica (and...

"Agency" – it’s is a very popular buzzword these days. Sexual agency, personal agency, the agency of minority groups– it gets thrown around constantly.Obviously I’m not talking about an institution that employs agents, but these ninth and tenth dictionary.com definitions:the state of being in action or exerting power: operationanda means of exerting power or influence: instrumentalityAgency is also an important concept in writing. Characters who do something are far more interesting than char...

I was raised on Celtic folk music -- my mother is 1/4 Welsh, and though her Scottish (and Scotch-Irish) ancestry is a bit further back, she raised us on the music, sang to us, found records, and introduced us to the Clancy Brothers, the Irish Rovers, and the Child Ballads. Later, I discovered the living tradition of Celtic folk, and fell in love with Silly Wizard, the Tannahill Weavers, and many others. When I was in Wales in 2001, I discovered contemporary Welsh folk music, which often doesn...

Antagonists or straight-out villains can be a real problem to write. Even authors I love often have difficulty with fleshing out antagonists and making them sufficiently believable. There are manifold reasons for this, and sometimes an author has more than one reason in effect which causes them to trip while trying to create a believable antagonist.One of the reasons, and one that has affected some of my own writing, is that if there are groups of antagonists, the protagonist may tend to see...