I had some kind of breakdown and cleaned my desk and office. Family says “wow” when they walk in now. Cleaning extends to metaphor too, as I get ready to dive into one last edit of this novel. Prepration takes many forms. Burnout (and the allure of younger, shinier projects) is a serious risk. I’ve [...]
As unlikely as this sounds, my desk is even messier than last month. In front of me I have an iPhone, on top of some papers, on top of a book, on top of one of the girl’s hand-mirrors, on top of a file folder with more papers, on top of an Amazon receipt, on [...]
Here’s a recent trend I can get behind: shared worldbuilding. Mur deserves credit as one of the pioneers here, with the rollout of Playing For Keeps and all the Stories of the Third Wave. Another that caught my eye was the Mongoliad, a serial novel by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and others, with lots of [...]
Important stuff first: food. When I started this recurring blog post it was about all the food items that could be found on my desk, but then something happened: I got braces. Eating anything is now a weighty decision that will end in an extended hygiene task. So I have xylitol mints and an assortment of teas [...]
After an epic cleaning session last month, things were pretty rough for a while. And by rough, I mean tidy on the desk. But now the iPad is back on my desk, to play Pandora. The new webapp is cool, but it uses so much memory over time that it chokes my system. (Symptoms = [...]
One thing I’ve picked up from acquiring editors and slush readers is that some view Standard Manuscript Format as a kind of IQ test. If a potential author can’t even follow simple, straightforward instructions, it’s easy and justified to simply toss out that submission and move on to the next. I wholly support this notion. [...]
Writer writes story. Writer submits story to market. Market requires submissions in Standard Manuscript Format. Market requires submissions as DOC or RTF. This narrative plays itself out every day. But it’s a problem for users like me that don’t rely on Microsoft tools. I get notes back from editors kindly mentioning that the story didn’t [...]
Amy had a thoughtful post about blogging and other social media for writers. She wrote I hate the thought of the dutiful yet miserable blogger. Which made me reflect on this blog, which I admittedly update infrequently. Is it a chore for me? Why do I do it? Simply put, a blog is part of [...]
Recently, we had an interesting discussion at our writing group. At what point in the writing process to you turn something over to a first reader? There’s a lot of variables, but in the end the answer amounts to “it depends on the reader and the author.” Some first readers thrive on offering broad, sweeping [...]
I publicly committed to a deadline of June 30 for my editing pass, and that deadline has wooshed past. That’s the problem with arbitrary deadlines–there’s no way to tell how realistic they are. It’s fair to say that before this point, I’ve never properly edited a novel before. Heck, it’s fair to say that even [...]