Recently, an article on The Millions discussed how the way writers write has changed more in the past thirty years than in the previous hundred. Part of that stems from the minimalist movement of the 1980s, which left fiction wilted and stunted in terms of style. When I was writing the first draft of Bad Moon Rising, I used long, flowing sentences that I had identified with during my undergraduate days, but was informed no one would desire to read it if I wrote that way. Selling out, it seemed, was a better alternative than being true to myself and writing in the style I wanted.

There has been an epidemic of novels written for YA lately that, if you look closely, the writing resembles someone narrating an anime episode. I am not necessarily opposed to anime, but if people want to create something that is going to stand the test of time, writing in halting scenes with very little to tie these scenes together is not going to do it. Trust me: I used to write like this.

My fourth novel has crested 126k words. This particular ‘section’ will need to be cleaned up and expanded in parts, but I think I can finally see the finish line (where have we heard that before). Working on tying this novel into the next one, which begins the great epic I started when I was 12.