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Time to Get Serious
by If you want to be a writer, you frequently see the advice that you need to build a huge platform, somewhere for people to come and find you, somewhere to interact with your potential fans, many somewheres all connected and tied together. A dominating social media presence, apparently, is critical. Look at <insert big name independent author here>. They built an awesome platform and sold a gazillion copies of their book. This does happen. But I think, if you do a little research, you’ll find it doesn’t happen all that often. The other path, the one that I think a much larger number of people are finding success on,…
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3rd Draft of a Novel
by So, I think I might have discussed my fiction writing process before, but to recap: 1st Draft = get the story out of my skull. The word dump. Sometimes it just pours into the keyboard and sometimes every word is a struggle. 2nd Draft = fix what’s broken. This starts with a read through, making notes as I go on what I think doesn’t work or needs to be improved. 3rd Draft = make it pretty. This draft is where the most words change. Sentences, paragraphs, and chapters might move around, or not, but while the story usually stays more or less intact, this draft involves a lot of…
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My Destiny Awaits
by So as I look back through my writing log, I find that there’s been about exactly 275 words of new fiction since I finished a flash piece on May 29th. Oh, I’ve written. Blog posts in the main, at least recently. Book reviews, scripting and show notes for Days of Geek. But not fiction. The summer was weird, though it did have a fair bit of editing involved, most of it on a single project that’s now only a handful of days from being finished the third draft. I’ve got lots of other things to edit, too, but I suddenly, finally, desperately need to work on something new. So…
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The Status of Status Bars
by If you’ve been here more than once, you might have noticed I have several status bars near the top right. These were supposed to be highlighting works in progress at any given moment. Well, they haven’t really changed. For a couple of months. The first draft of “Listening Station” has been done longer than I’d like to think about, and I should really take it down, but it does make me feel like I’ve managed something this year. The third draft of Ancient Runes got about half an hour of attention over the summer. And I don’t want to think about the Sooper Seekrit Projekt at the moment, except…
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So What Does “Shifting Priorities” Mean for the Website?
by So what do I really mean when I say “shifting priorities” and “refocusing my efforts”? Well, I don’t mean I’m giving up writing or creative pursuits, that’s for sure. Too many stories I want to tell. But I’m certainly changing how much I’m pursuing and how fast. The ‘Hitlist’ contains several sublists for project ordering. But, as I said, I’m making some philosophical changes, and those necessitate a little rearranging of my online world, too. I’ve let the renaissanceninja.com domain go, having decided there isn’t any point in the extra complexity of maintaining two personal blogs, even though I’ve mostly been trying to keep this one as a writing…
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Warning! I Finally Finished This Story
by And this post consists (almost) purely of me be happy about it. Don’t say you didn’t know that before you read it. After I got home from work this morning, I sat, bleary eyed in front of the computer for forty-five minutes and imported the final three scenes of a story from the dictated files and cleaned them up so the sentences at least made sense. Making it pretty is for a later draft. With all of the cleaning and tidying done, “Klaatu Barada Nikto, Baby!” is a 5,000 7,500 12,000 16,000 17,500 19,704 word short story novelette novella that’s part adventure, part parody, and a lot of fun…
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Writing Report for March 2019
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The Great Dictation Experiment
by So I’m trying an experiment I’ve talked about several times in the last year or so. Maybe even longer. Getting to and from work for me takes about 50 minutes in the car. Ordinarily, most of that time is taken up by listening to podcasts. I’m subscribed to around 30 at any given time and usually one or two of them are recent so I’m working my way through back catalog. But I’ve thought about using this time a little differently, or at least some of it, by dictating fiction. First draft, theoretically. The basic idea is that I talk into my phone (or possibly my Zoom) for part or…
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March Writing Update
by So the targets I set for March were aggressive considering a family vacation and what I met and missed is a bit scattered. I didn’t really contend with the level of exhaustion when I got back from vacation and didn’t predict a small hardware failure (and fried flash drive) resulting in the loss of several days work (yes, I’ve been lazy about backups lately) or taking a week off after that hardware failure. Or the amount of time the girls and I have spent prepping for Ad Astra next weekend. All of which is okay. Especially the last one. That’s better than okay, it’s awesome. But to focus…
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February Writing Update
by February Writing Update Covering the month of February, 2013, here’s an update of my writing progress for the month with maybe a couple of sentences at the end on where I am for the year. Total Words of New Fiction: 16,586 Of which 5,880 were in Dreams of Freedom. Yes, I set a low bench mark of 5,000 this month, but that was to focus on other things while still making a progress on the first draft. Another 4,918 went into new material for the first of the Warforge: Caledonia short novels, finishing off one transitional scene, all of a second, and starting a third. There are three more…
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How to Turn a 3k Short Story into an 11k Novelette in 3 Easy Steps
by It’s not as hard as it sounds, especially when you’re writing short stories in a big universe that you’ve already got three short novels set in with literally dozens of neat little things you could pick up. And some of them aren’t so little. So… 1. Start with a clear idea for a short story Most of the short stories I plan to write this year fall into the Warforge universe. I’d like to have about 20 to go along with the three short novels in the first triad (not trilogy as I’m still debating whether to weave them back together into a single story or not). “Closing Time”…
