Episode 8: The Literary Color Palette Authors have a number of tools of the trade. Three important ones when conveying and creating emotion are tone, mood, and theme. In this episode, we define all three, and discuss their uses in fiction.

Episode 7: Hook, Line, and Sinker In this episode about grabbing the attention of your reader, we discuss The Hollywood Give, and its close cousin The Literary Give. We also get into two important aspects to hooking the audience, the opening line, and the inciting incident.

Episode 6: Build a world You have great characters? Fantastic! Now they need somewhere to live. In this episode, we talk about some of the aspects involved with world building. Whether it’s real world, modern day, historical, or somewhere else, you’ve got to set up rules for your world. Sometimes that’s as easy as inserting...

Episode 5: Flaws and All With the good comes the bad. True in life, true in people, and true in characters. In this episode, we talk about character flaws, how they make your characters better, and the problem with ‘perfection’.

Episode 4: Character Unless it’s about robots, your story is going to be filled with people. In this episode, we discuss the importance of making them believable and how to accomplish that.

Episode 3: …From a Certain Point of View Before starting a novel, one of the most important things to do is choosing your story’s point of view. In this episode, we’ll discuss all three, as well as literary tense and the view modifiers.

Episode 2: Genre, and the dangers of unprotected writing It’s not always fun to look at problems, but when you’re preparing to write a novel, you need to understand the bad as well as the good. Every genre has its own pitfalls and complications. Whether it’s getting facts right or extra work on behalf of...

Episode 1: Introduction, Forward What do you need to write a novel? In the premiere episode, we give a brief introduction to the steps every author should take before the first word ever hits the page. Understanding plot and story, an introduction to genres and their relation to the plot, logline, blurb, synopsis, and a...

Tune in to the Word Count Workshop for writing advice from author and publishing company owner Neil Herndon as he takes you through the ins and outs of the writing process. This podcast covers everything you need to know, and talks about it all from a writer’s perspective. Every workshop episode covers a different topic...