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Set a New Writing Goal Day
by For those of you taking note of the Year of CelebrationTM, Tuesday (Februay 19th) was Set a New Writing Goal Day. Yes, a totally made up holiday, it falls on the 50th day of the year, a good day, I thought, to review goals for the year and adjust them if they seem too unrealistic in one direction or the other. My overall writing goals for the year, while aggressive, still looked doable. January started slow in terms of hitting targets, but February seemed to be a month for good, solid performance and I felt like I’d hit every target for the second month of the year. I skimmed…
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Editing is Weird
by I like editing. There, I said it. Many writers will raise an eyebrow or two at that. Some will express actual shock. Some people who profess to love writing or being writers also are free with the knowledge that they hate editing. But I like it. Sometimes I love it. Working on my own fiction, I enjoy editing at least as much as drafting. Sometimes more. Every writer has their own process, unique to that person. Mine has a fair number of quirks to it, but I doubt that’s unusual. I also have an obsession with numbers that, in my experience, most people don’t share. More on that in…
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January Writing Update
by So, as promised, here’s the first Writing Update for 2013, covering the month of January. Total Words of New Fiction: 15,740 Of which 6798 were in Dreams of Freedom. Considering the goal was 20,000, that’s not all that impressive, however more on that in a minute. 1021 were the first half of a new scene in Warforge: Caledonia. The remaining 7,921 words went into “Klaatu Barada Nikto, Baby!” and a Warforge short story tentatively titled “Closing Time”. Neither of these stories are actually complete at this point and the overall word count left me 604 words short on this month’s short fiction goal. On the editing side of things:…
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Writing Goals for 2013
by So, the Three Year Plan notwithstanding, I’ve got some writing goals for 2013. I don’t want to use the word “resolutions”. Too easy to give up and I’m all about flexibility and adaptability in accomplishing my goals. My overall word target is a moving one, but the initial one is big. Bigger than I’ve ever managed before. Bigger than the last two years combined. Granted that the last couple of years have not been the best, creatively, but I have high hopes for 2013. Looking into the future, it seems pretty bright. And the goal amounts to only 1,000 words per day, not counting blogging or philosophy. Both of…
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A Quick Writing Update
by So I haven’t blogged much lately, but I have been getting some stuff done. Christmas, mostly, but a little bit of writing and related activities as well. I’ve done most of the pre-writing I want to do for Dreams of Freedom and expect to start writing it somewhere between now and Christmas. The story is taking shape pretty well in my head and I hope that’s a good thing. Previous experience with detailed plotting has had me lose interest pretty quickly once I start writing. I’m usually better off only plotting three or four chapters ahead at most. Trying things a little differently this time, so we’ll see how…
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Plotting a Novel, Roughly
by So I spent an hour and a half yesterday morning roughing out a novel. Well, two thirds of one, anyway. It’s a story that’s been nibbling at the back of my brain now and then for about a year now and I’ve been content to let it nibble for the most part, though I’ve drafted a couple of the early scenes just to keep it under control while I tried to accomplish other things. That stopped working yesterday. My brain has begun demanding that I find some way to get this story into a more complete form and out of my skull. I thought maybe if I sketched out…
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Green Man’s Revenge
by So I’ve been working on a story for submission to the Urban Green Man anthology and I don’t think I’m going to make it for the November 30th deadline. Well, I’m going to have it finished, but it’s not going to work out. No, this isn’t me doing the editors’ job for them. If I can conform to the guidelines, I’ll send it, but… The story is a good one, I think, the characters work, I’m hitting all of the points I wanted, and things are really coming together. Yes, I left starting the story late, but that’s because I actually threw away three complete plots and tossed half…
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It’s Always a Good Day to be Published
by Whatever else might happen, it’s an awesome day when a contract shows up in your inbox because someone wants to publish one of your stories. I’m not a big needer of public recognition (although it’s nice sometimes) and individual rejections don’t bother me all that much (although a big pile of them in a short period of time can be a little frustrating), but when a story comes back as one that someone actually likes enough to pay you for, that’s pretty cool. “Mission Log, Day 67” will be appearing in the Kazka Press e-anthology At Year’s End: SFF Holiday Stories. My story is a short SF piece that…
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The Green Struggle
by “Carlos woke blindfolded, gagged, wrists and ankles wrapped in duct tape, and with the taste of dryer sheets in his mouth.” It’s an awesome opening line, isn’t it? At least I think so, and I got a compliment on Twitter plus a DM that said it was attention getting. So yeah, it’s an awesome opening line. The problem is that it leads into a story that’s going to be very linear and predictable if I write it as I’ve rough plotted it out. It’s supposed to be an idea for a story submission to the upcoming “Urban Green Man” anthology, but I’m not feeling a lot of originality in…
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It’s Gotta Rock
by So I’ve been watching a lot of lectures and presentations lately about the art of storytelling and story structure and creativity and, and, and… well, I’ve been watching a lot of lectures and presentations lately. Why? Well, I’m still thinking about rejection letters (see this post) and how, apparently, my stories are consistently well written, but I’m still missing something. Watching all of this video, I’m frequently running into the Henry Miller quote, “You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer.” Because I’m a genre fiction writer, I also keep coming you to the David Gerrold version, “Your first million words are…
