While my writing buddy Lisa Silverthorne is playing completely by the rules by posting her Dare progress every day—I’ve been a horrible slacker, just plunking words down and not doing the needful here. Yes, I suck. On the plus side, I am moving forward. The story is at just under 25,000 words now. Today was […]

Yeah, I know these Novel Dare entries are intended to be about the work I’m doing on the book itself, but this one didn’t really go there. Sorry about that. I’ll do better tomorrow. # # # As fate would have it, the mailman brought me a contributor’s copy of the “Spies” edition of Fiction […]

I dreamed about the book last night. I think that’s a good sign, though to be honest I can’t really remember exactly what the dream was. That’s how dreaming is for me, mostly—I wake up with the memory of having dreamed, feeling a lingering aura for maybe a few minutes, a snippet of it in […]

For folks who are insane enough to want to follow this process, I thought it might be fun to talk about outlining vs. pantsing, and how I’ve worked so far this time. The fact of the matter is that I’ve worked in all sorts of ways, and I think the “right” answer is regarding whether […]

Yeah, I know. Supposed to be daily updates. I get it. Bottom line: things are going pretty much as they need to. As expected, on Thursday I lost half a day to a doctor’s appointment, then took care of errands Friday (yesterday afternoon) before having a great conversation with Lisa (the friend/writer who is Daring […]

I had another pretty good day that resulted in just short of 2500 words. I’m doing a lot of exploratory work at this point. I think I’m writing out of order to some degree, and that some of this is going to move out into later parts of the story—but I wrote them now because […]

Day one of the Novel Dare is in the books and despite the fact that I only created about 500 words, it was a pretty good one. Having decided to write the weird baseball SF/fantasy/thriller, I decided I had to set my brain by going back and touching base Casey Neal, my main character. So […]

I did NaNoWriMo* once. It wasn’t much fun. (* National Novel Writing Month is where several hundred thousand people sit down to cram 50,000 words into a month’s time). For me the problem is that NaNoWeiMofeels feels more like a carnival than a practice, more a flash of frivolity than going to a place of […]