tag:www.jamesnelsonauthor.com,2011-08-30://1 Movable Type Pro 5.12 tag:www.jamesnelsonauthor.com,2011:/blog//2.14 2011-11-28T01:02:50Z 2011-12-03T00:22:31Z

Posted from Penguin.com (usa) blogSomeone asked me recently where the idea for the volcano came from in the title of my new novel, On The Volcano. Since authors of first novels live in hope someone will ask a question about...

James Nelson http://www.jamesnelsonauthor.com/ Penguin.com (usa) blog

Someone asked me recently where the idea for the volcano came from in the title of my new novel, On The Volcano. Since authors of first novels live in hope someone will ask a question about their work, I replied happily, as follows.

I wrote the first paragraph as a stand-alone idea a long time ago. I had no idea it might turn into a book. I simply saw a girl in her teens looking out over an enormous, unexplored crater, describing the lonely and very dramatic place in which she lived, and I wrote it down.

I put that paragraph into a file where I store similar first paragraphs that someday might or might not turn into stories. Reading these paragraphs over some time later, I liked this one particularly well. I decided to write a few more paragraphs. And then a few more, and a few more after that, and before I knew it I had 10,000 words, and I was writing a book.

Naturally, I had to give my volcano a lot more thought. I knew it wasn't like Mt. Saint Helens or Crater Lake, or any of the volcanoes I'd seen in Mexico or Hawaii or the Northwest states. I knew it was enormous, but not bigger than the Ngorongoro Crater in Africa, lest it be unbelievable. So, I assembled a volcano from spare parts of volcanoes I had seen or read about, coupled with chunks of the Rocky Mountains I grew up next to, plus a few invented characteristics that made my volcano unlike any the reader might have encountered either in books or in real life.

]]> tag:www.jamesnelsonauthor.com,2011:/blog//2.11 2011-11-24T12:29:42Z 2011-12-03T00:20:44Z

Writers must have blogs. That' a fact. Everyone has told me so. Now that I think about it I kind of like the idea. So here goes. Entry Number One In My Blog. What will my blog be about? It...

James Nelson http://www.jamesnelsonauthor.com/
What will my blog be about? It will be about my books, about other people's books, and about writing in general. About getting into print. About what happens when you do get into print--reviews, promotions, book sales--and what happens to the author while all this is going on.

We'll begin with how my book got started. But we won't start today. I'll save that for my next entry. Long term, I'm not sure I'm long-winded enough to keep a blog going. So that's all I'm going to say now, except...

Welcome!

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