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 […]
Amid all the other crap going on in our politics—all of which are important—we have two issues that are going to fundamentally change the lives of every person on the planet. The book I’m working on now touches on one of them, the book I’ll work on next (probably) takes on the other. The first […]
If you’ve been paying any attention to what’s going on here on this blog (and why would you be, it’s been quiet quiet enough here you could hear a gnat fart…so to speak), you’ll have figured out I’ve been struggling with what should be the last book of my Stealing the Sun series. It’s been […]
Taking a break from book seven, again…and thinking about a tangentially related thing that’s stuck with me… A few days back, I saw this comment on a friend’s social media page: Believing in small government, personal responsibility and the ability of people to create businesses and pull themselves up out of poverty doesn’t mean that […]
I’m very pleased to note the my short-short “I Dreamed You Were a Spaceship” has now been published by Analog. When I say short-short, I mean it fits on two pages. Given that, it probably won’t surprise you if I say that this is a piece that came along pretty much fully formed. It apparently […]
A few months back, someone close to me asked if I ever had to be politically correct while I was writing. This person is not political, but when pressed into such conversations is clearly conservative of mindset—though I admit I’m not sure they understand why or, really, what it means. Regardless, this question is tied […]