I have, for the last few hours, been musing about two movies I watched over the weekend. For those doing the maths: yes, that means I get up obscenely early. Yes, I wish it were otherwise. Screw the goddamn apnea. Anyway, the movies.The first, Comet, is a small movie that charts the relationship between two […]
unday. The day of rest. The day of having a sleep in and getting the laundry done. The day of The Sunday Circle, where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three […]
2016 is looming, as new years tend to do. I’ve been sorting through the options of big, writing-adjacent goal-setting projects I’d be interested in doing to replace the mad dash of the 600k year. Doing nothing was pretty high on the list, but that’s not in my nature. I like having big meta-projects to focus on […]
It’s early. My eyes hurt. I have to go to the day-job today, when all I really want is to stay home and tinker with the opening scenes of the novel in progress. Maybe write the ending to one of the hundreds of unfinished short-stories on my hard-drive, that are waiting for me to figure […]
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, last week was pants. Nothing went seriously wrong. Nothing went seriously right. It was just the kind of awful, no-good week that doesn’t really deserve that designation. The kind of week where you huddle up in your house, utterly certain that everything you do is wrong, that […]
I’m off to teach a course on characters in a few hours, so I’ll refer people back to last week’s post if they need a whole bunch of context about the how and why of The Sunday Circle. Short version: I am interested in what people are working on, what people are reading, and in providing a […]
I watched The Lego Movie last week. This puts me considerably behind the curve, given my circle of friends. The vast majority of the people I know seem to have watched this film ages ago, pitched themselves head-first into its charms, and come out the other end with Everything is Awesome stuck in their head […]
As a writer, one of your chief weapons is surprise. Surprise and delight. Surprise and delight and properly crafted reader expectations. Surprise, delight, properly crafted reader expectations, and…well, in my case, incredibly long blog posts where I blather on about things.. Surprise, delight, properly crafted reader expectations, incredibly long blog posts, and…Well, I could go […]
Last week I set aside my first draft notebooks and fired up my writing computer for the first time in two months, kicking off the first chapter of a project that’s living in my head as Untitled Space-Bro! Space-Marine Novel for about two years now. I’ll be honest: this surprised me. I was pretty sure […]
INCREDIBLE THING 1: ANGELA SLATTER WON A MOTHER-FUCKING WORLD FANTASY AWARD Technically not incredible, by the strictest of definitions, as anyone who is surprised by Angela Slatter winning major awards hasn’t been paying attention for the last few years. But she’s also one of the hardest working writers I know, hustles like a champion, and writes brilliant […]
So I got caught up in an interesting debate on twitter on the other night, largely revolving around the question of whether or not 50K actually constituted a novel-length work and the difference between answering yes to that question, answering yes, but it may be extraordinarily hard to sell, depending on your genre, and answering no, it’s a […]
Warning: word-count neepery associated with the 600k challenge follows. You can skip today’s post if that’s not your thing. Right. So yesterday, at Write Club, I did this Which means I’ve now written nine of the ten chapters I had planned for the novel I’m working on and there’s just one more to go. Probably […]
