The Story Craft Cafe Podcast storycraftcafe

Ellery Lloyd is the pseudonym for the London-based husband and wife team of Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos whose last novel, instant New York Times bestseller The Club, a “smart, stylish, and savage” (People Magazine), was a Reese’s Book Club pick. The former deputy editor of Grazia Middle East, content director of Elle (UK), and editorial director at Soho House, Collette studied History of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has worked in Sydney, Dubai, and London. She has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Sunday Times. Paul is the author of two previous novels, Welcome to the Working Week and Every Day Is Like Sunday. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.They are also the authors of People Like Her.

Christopher was homeschooled by his parents. As a child, he often wrote short stories and poems, made frequent trips to the library, and read widely. Some of his favorite books were Bruce Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Raymond E. Feist’s Magician (now available in volumes one and two), as well as books by Anne McCaffrey, Jane Yolen, Brian Jacques, E.R. Eddison, David Eddings, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
The idea of Eragon began as the daydreams of a teen. Christopher’s love for the magic of stories led him to craft a novel that he would enjoy reading. The project began as a hobby, a personal challenge; he never intended it to be published. Before he began writing Eragon, he plotted out the entire adventure. He found that doing some of the same things as his characters allowed him to better understand their world, as well as to think of descriptions that otherwise would not have occured to him. To this end he forged his own knives and swords, made chain mail, spun wool, camped in the Beartooth Mountains, made his own bow, built survival shelters, learned to track game, fletched arrows, felled trees, hiked, and camped. In short, the books embody a great deal of his experience of living in Montana.
His work also combined elements gathered from research and from his imagination. He read a huge amount of folklore while growing up, ranging from the Brothers Grimm to Beowulf, Nordic sagas, and the Aeneid, along with contemporary fantasy and science fiction. In addition, he learned about weaponry, food, clothing, and customs from the Middle Ages, which is roughly the era he envisioned Eragon living in. Armed with that information, he daydreamed the scenes with his characters. Then he took pen to paper and tried to recreate those images with words.
Christopher was fifteen when he wrote the first draft of Eragon. He took a second year to revise the book, and then gave it to his parents to read. The family decided to self-publish the book and spent a third year preparing the manuscript for publication: copyediting, proofreading, designing a cover, typesetting the manuscript, and creating marketing materials. During this time Christopher drew the map for Eragon, as well as the dragon eye for the book cover (which now appears inside the Knopf hardcover edition). The manuscript was sent to press and the first books arrived in November 2001. The Paolini family spent the next year promoting the book at libraries, bookstores, and schools in 2002 and early 2003.

Michael La Ronn talks about how you can be the most productive and creative by making adjustments to your mindset, and accomplish more than you thought possible.
 
Guest workshops like Michael La Ronn's Level-Up Your Author Mindset are just one of the great new features we're bringing to Dabble Premium for now extra cost. The Dabble Premium experience isn't just about providing the world's best novel-writing platform, but we're there to help you achieve your author dreams with resources and events like:









Workshops and guest speakers
Live Office Hours
Opportunities for personalized feedback
Deep-dive articles and custom resources for serious authors
If you want to take your writing to the next level, check out all Dabble Premium has to offer: https://www.dabblewriter.com/pricing











 

Craft Q&A Office Hours are meant to answer your most pressing questions. During our live events, we always get a bunch of questions spanning the entire spectrum of writing and storytelling. So we decided to dedicate some time to answer them.

Michael La Ronn (also known as M.L. Ronn) has published over 80 science fiction & fantasy novels and self-help books for writers. His fiction includes the urban fantasy Good Necromancer series, the dark fantasy Last Dragon Lord series, and the futuristic science fiction Android X series. Currently, he writes primarily urban fantasy. His nonfiction books for writers include the bestselling Be a Writing Machine, which teaches how to beat writer’s block forever, and The Pocket Guide to Pantsing, which explains how to write a novel without an outline (with confidence). Michael also runs the award-winning YouTube channel “Author Level Up,” with over 40,000 subscribers and 2 million views. Writer’s Digest voted the channel one of the “Best Resources for Writers” in 2020. Michael devoted himself to the writing life in 2012 after a near-death experience, writing 10 to 12 books per year despite working a demanding full-time job as an insurance executive, raising a family, and attending law school classes in the evenings. His productivity methods are so effective that his YouTube subscribers have accused him of being a cyborg in disguise (he pleads the fifth). For more information on Michael’s books, visit his fiction website at www.michaellaronn.com and his resources for writers at www.authorlevelup.com.

Michael Callahan is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Searching for Grace Kelly and The Night She Won Miss America, as well as a coffee-table history of the famed Musso & Frank Grill restaurant in Hollywood. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, his work has been published in Esquire, Town & Country, and the New York Times, among others. He lives in Los Angeles.
In the summer of 1959, rising Hollywood ingenue Mercy Welles is on the cusp of stardom when she vanishes without a trace. Almost 60 years later, Kit O’Neill, a young television producer in New York, is stunned to discover that her recently deceased grandmother, the woman who raised her, was, in fact, Mercy Welles. As Kit embarks on a journey to uncover the truth about what happened that fateful summer, long-forgotten correspondence offers a window to the past that reveals the shocking secrets that forever changed Mercy’s life—and may also change Kit’s.