Dragging Up Old Stuff

June 10, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Monday I was mostly working on covers for those three stories. I’m still not crazy about them, but since I’m not a graphic artist I figure I’ll just go with what I have. Three stories are ready to go on KDP, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet because I still want to do some more research. I’m bad like that.

Today I only got in 45 minutes of writing so far, although the day is still relatively young. I did about 1000 words on a silly project I started a long time ago, a long-form seat-of-the-pants story about teenagers meeting vampires, and the vampires really are horrible monsters. I have no idea where this is going, which is sort of the point of the project; no editing, no looking back. I figure I can do a couple thousand more words today.

However, it’s slower than when I have full creative voice kicked in, and part of that is because I have to look back to remember what I was doing before. These are half-finished stories I started years ago, and while I remember all of them, I need to go make sure I’m not screwing up some important detail. That doesn’t really happen when you do a whole story from scratch, beginning to end, because it’s fresh in your mind. I think I might be better off just starting some new stuff instead of finishing the old. So why bother?

I guess I just hate to leave things half-done.

Filed under Useless Blog-Like Non-Content, Writing Process

Writing > Not Writing

June 8, 2014 by Leave a Comment

 Three years between posts really isn’t that big a deal in my own mind, as anyone who’s stumbled across my old blog will realize.

The bad thing about this pause is that I really wasn’t writing.

Today I started to fix that.

Read more of this post

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Dean Wesley Smith Gave Me an Attitude Adjustment

May 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I’m a big fan of Dean Wesley Smith‘s blog about publishing and writing. he has an excellent series up called Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing, but it’s more than that. It’s about killing the idiotic myths that get in the way of new writers… well, more specifically, some of the idiotic myths that  get in my way as a new writer. The most recent entry is all about this last point, because all of these obstacles boil down to fear.

There are some other things in his blog I didn’t really get, most specifically about his admonition to not rewrite–well, he does say there are some authors for whom rewriting works, but for a newbie he recommends against it–and working in creative voice. I understood these things on a superficial level, but didn’t understand the why, until very recently.

How I finally got it: Read more of this post

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First Submissions Away

May 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Let the rejection dance begin!

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First!!!11one

April 4, 2011 by 1 Comment

In December of 2010, in the middle of a truly horrendous snowstorm, I stayed up all night in order to deal with the arcane rules about moving cars during a snow emergency in St. Paul. (Actually they’re fairly clear, just never uniformly enforced and they assume people have normal sleep patterns.) While pounding espresso after espresso and listening to the entire Clutch discography nonstop, something broke in my brain. Read more of this post

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