Happy shut-in coronavirus days to you, internet traveler. I'm dropping a little shred of good news fluttering your way on the winds of uncertainty, isolation, and a shocking scarcity of toilet paper... This week, Pikes Peak Writers announced their winners for the 2020 Zebulon Fiction Contest. My entry, HALF-LIFE (the SF post-apocalyptic novel I'm currently… Continue reading Zebulon Contest News…
On January 30, 2020, I participated in my very first Twitter pitching event. And girl, do I have some THOUGHTS. But first, maybe some definition of terms. I know not all of the people who read this blog are writers, and y'all might be thinking, what the heck is pitching? When writers write a story,… Continue reading Pitching a Novel in a Tweet? What is this, the technological dystopian future?
November is gone. I have to take a moment, to lift my head from the laptop, to let my eyes adjust to the sunlight, to start breathing again. 50,011 words. National Novel Writing Month is over. I did it. None of it feels real. I wonder if this has to do with John Gardner's idea… Continue reading What I Learned from My First NaNoWriMo
Just looked at today's date and realized it's the end of NaNo Week 3. No blog post update drafted. Aaaaand that's how my week three is going, folks. I'm solidly beyond the "beginning" parts of the book, into what might tentatively be called the "middle." For me, writing the middle is more than a little… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 3 or Oops, I Forgot to Write a Blog Post
Popping my head up from the word-count trenches to give a quick, week-two update... (Here are my two previous posts about my NaNo foray if you're interested: my commitment to actually participate, and my week 1 update.) Definitely some rough days where my mental/creative energy output wasn't sufficient to hit that magic number (1,667 words). I gave… Continue reading NaNoWriMo 2019: Week 2
I'm going to try NaNoWriMo this year. That sentence is terrifying. Well, not if you don't know what the abbreviation stands for. It's National Novel Writing Month, which is November 1-30 every year. Basically, a bunch of psychos try to write 50,000-word novel drafts in a month. There's a little more nuance than that. But… Continue reading NaNoWriMo What Now?
Ursula K. Le Guin says, resoundingly, "Wrong!" The second chapter of her book on writing, Steering the Craft, is all about punctuation. (Check out my post about the first chapter here!) She writes, "...punctuation tells the reader how to hear your writing." It is a crucial tool, and not to be overlooked. My experience with… Continue reading Steering the Craft, Part 2: PUNCTUATION
Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the best and most important contemporary writers of science fiction. Her prose is immaculate, whether she was focusing on gender politics in The Left Hand of Darkness, consumer culture in The Dispossessed, creating sci-fi tech that others will use for decades (the ansible: a communication device that relays… Continue reading Steering the Craft, Part 1: SOUND
I've been largely absent here for 2019. Sorry about that. I've been putting my writing energy and time into my novel. The concept for it has been rattling around in my head since 2014. I only just found an ending in November 2018, and, in May 2019, finished a first, full draft of the whole… Continue reading Stop Writing, Please
There are two kinds of writers. Plotters, those who plan out the events of their stories before they write, and pantsers, those who write without knowing where they're going. I have been (and probably always will be) a pantser. This is fun for me while I'm writing, but hell when trying to put together a… Continue reading The Problem with the Hero’s Journey
