This is part three of my occasional sci-fi serial about a science team dealing with an alien intruder on their romote research bate. After each installment, readers get a week to make a choice that will inform what happens next. You can read the first two installments on the series page. When last we left […]
Part two of my sci-fi serial where readers get to choose what happens next. When we encountered the three-person team manning Remote Research Station Denki back in part 1, they were surprised by a mysterious knock on the door…and no details appearing on any scans. Readers go to vote on how they responded, and I’ve […]
A few months back, I wrote a little vignette while experimenting with tools from Mary Robinette Kowal’s flash fiction workshop on Patreon. The end result wasn’t quite a stand-alone flash piece, and wasn’t quite a short story, but something in between—the opening scene of a longer story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a story I was going […]
I recently opened the “unfinished drafts” section of my blog and discovered that I had 52 unfinished posts in various states of completion. Some of these resulted from dumping a quick idea using the WordPress app on my phone, little more than three of four words to be fleshed out later. Some are just a […]
Back in my teenage years, as a young comic book fan, I copied a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and stuck it on my wall. I wasn’t a kid given to this kind of behaviour, but this fragment where Gaiman’s protagonist, Dream, describes the creation of the first Corinthian spoke to me even then: Imagine […]
One of the weirder side-effects of going all-in on doing print projects with Brain Jar Press was the increased number of folks who hired me to do layout and cover design in other places. It turns out small chapbooks make for very effective business cards. I kinda put some long and hard thought into accepting […]
Over the past few months Brain Jar Press has released a series of chapbooks and short story collections at a pretty decent clip. Both Kathleen Jennings Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion and Angela Slatter’s Red New Day and Other MicroFictions have sold in surprising numbers (and, in Kathleen’s case, really surprising numbers). We’ve brought […]
Over the past few weeks I’ve been following the Observation Journal template laid out by Kathleen Jennings, pushing myself to pay attention to creative patterns and sites of attention. Structurally speaking, given my focus on Publishing rather than Writing at the moment, my right-hand pages tend to be a lot less on creative exercises and […]
Years ago, when I first discovered Tumblr, I’d intended to use it as a public dumping ground for research links and images I might want to use later. Resurrecting the idea here, since virtually nobody comes to blogs anymore, but the folks that do probably share my obsession with seeing how ideas manifest some five […]
Tomorrow the second Keith Murphy book, Frost, goes live over on Amazon. As always, I recommend pre-ordering a copy to have it delivered fresh. To celebrate the moment, I went and dug out my first pitch for a Keith Murphy serial that I sent through to the Edge of Propinquity ‘zine back in 2010, laying […]
Word count on my exegesis draft ticked past the minimum viable word count last night, although I’m still a few thousand words away from having a final draft. Which puts me behind the self-imposed deadline I set up back in April, but well ahead of my last attempt at writing one of these where I […]
I’ve been wearing my thesis hat a good deal through October, because there’s an official deadline to get an exegesis draft finished by November 30. It’s gotta be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words. My impulse is to aim for the middle, assuming some stuff is going in ’cause I missed it while I will […]
