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A Quick Update
by Been awfully quiet here so far this year, and I’m sorry about that. Not that that changes anything or that the relative quiet is going to shift much until the term is over. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to do well this time around at university. You know, actually live up to my supposed academic potential. It’s working out so far, but it usually means that if school is in session, I’m not doing much else. Really, I should have figured that out before now, but every term is a new one, right? A new one with higher level courses or new material that’s sometimes hard…
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Writing Recap for 2022
by I’ll say it again: overall, 2022 was a good year, but you’d never know it by looking at my blog. Flipflopping on the Edna Mode quote, I’m going to spend this post looking back. I’m not going to hit every category I track things under, just the high points, I think. And I’m not going to reference last year’s goals. They were mostly unrealistic based on how the academics worked out. I’ve scaled things back a bit for 2023. Total word count: 155,072. Almost 2/3 of this falls under the heading of non-fiction, and most of that working on the Memory Project. To refresh, that’s a sort of personal…
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It’s Time to Podcast
by Probably long past time. I’ve been threatening to podcast my fiction for a while and about a year ago even added to one of the short versions of my writer’s bio that I’m “conspiring to commit a podcast” of some of my fiction. Well, it’s time to stop conspiring and commit that podcast. Or two podcasts. The one that will likely start first won’t be my fiction. Instead, it will be about my fiction – the process, the things I think about, the way I see writing and the activities that go into and are part of it. I’ll likely branch out into publishing and other related creative work.…
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The Podcast Rises!
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Cut Doesn’t Mean Thrown Away
by Writers may have run across the phrase that you need to “kill your darlings”. A sentence, scene, storyline, or character unnecessary to the plot needs to be removed for the sake of the overall story. For reference, this means to be objective when you edit. Make sure that everything in the final story needs to be there. It doesn’t mean to get rid of things just to make the story shorter, to fit some arbitrary word count, because it’s your favourite, or anything like that. It also doesn’t mean you just throw it away. Maybe it’s the germ of some other story. Maybe it can be fleshed out a…
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My Ko-Fi Shop
by I’ve mentioned it here and there but haven’t made a big deal out of it. I don’t often make a big deal out of things, do I? Probably, I should make a bigger deal out of this. There are a lot of crowdfunding models available for creators now and a lot of different services to take advantage of them. While I likely will branch out to a couple of other things as well, I’ve picked Ko-Fi as a starting point for several reasons. Ko-Fi has been around for a couple of years and they seem fairly stable. How little they take in commission – nothing on tips/donations and 5%…
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Character Description – Try Not To Do It
by Why do so many writers spend so much time and so many words on character description? Get to the story, already! Okay, there’s more to my feelings on the subject than just that irritable exclamation, and I mean more than just describing the POV character. Any character description falls into this bucket. And I’m trying to come at this from the perspective as a reader for enjoyment, not in any professional capacity, though some of my internal comments when I’m submission reading for Bards and Sages may relate to this. Specifically, I’m talking about is when a paragraph or more (sometimes a lot more) gives me every possible physical…
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Something About Balance?
by And then three months with no blog activity. Well, after reading week, things got busier and there’s a certain amount of pressure for me to perform at my absolute academic peak right now. Not that that will change when I manage to get my major shifted to Honours Physics (with a couple of additions on top of that) and when/if I manage to get accepted into an education program. Sure, I’ve put a lot of that pressure on myself, but that’s because I know making a change of this magnitude at my age doesn’t really give a lot of wiggle room to make mistakes and figure things out. So…
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590 Days in a Row
by On the 20th of March of 2020, five days after almost everything else had shut down for COVID, a week after I’d had to have individual conversations with the 70+ staff in my department that the casino was shutting down for a few weeks while society got a grip on COVID (and no, we didn’t know exactly how long, but the indications we’d been given suggested we’d be open again before summer – look back on that now and choose your emotional reaction), upper management gave most of the rest of us the same speech, ultimately leaving just the General Managers and the site Maintenance Managers for our district,…
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The Plan
by Or part of it, anyway. Because there is one. It’s reasonably detailed, too. The question that remains is how close I’ll stick to it. Well, and how much the universe and regular life events will interfere with me trying to stick to it. At a high level, the writing plan is relatively straight forward and consists of a target number of Flash pieces, Short Stories, Novels (just one of those), Poems, Journal entries, and Blog posts. There will still be a focus on editing this year, but I’m more caught up than I was when I started that focus, um, before COVID maybe? It’s been a while. But I…
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Change in Design Philosophy
by I’ve recently undergone a bit of design philosophy change when it comes to e-books. Well, books in general, but e-books specifically. I’ve always enjoyed those few pages some publishers put in the back of the book giving you a taste of the sequel or another work by the author. The first couple of chapters or to the end of the scene that breaks 5,000-ish words. A glimpse of things to come. Love it. Not everyone does, and that’s fine. But I have seen a few notes here and there that it upsets some people to get to the end of the story before they’ve gotten to the end of…
