Around this time two years ago (as I commemorated last year) I started submitting short fiction in earnest and except for a few dry spells, have not stopped. Except for November (during which time I was working on a novella) I have submitted at least one story each month for the last year: 53 stories. […]
OK, I’ve finished hacking at Conan Doyle’s masterpiece! I’ve uploaded the result, which I edited with Word’s Track Changes turned on, if you care to have a read. (Study in Scarlet Chapter 1 edited) So, what did I actually do? More or less what I decided last time: Shortened by about 200 words (roughly 10% […]
In my last post I proposed an exercise in editing/revision: edit the first chapter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes book, “A Study in Scarlet”. I’ve now read through the chapter a couple times, and here’s my thinking about it. (I’ll post under the cut for those who are thinking of doing this, but […]
I have struggled over the past few years with honing my revision skills. I don’t have that much text to work with, and one of my problems is that I’m too close to it. I get some practice with folks whose work I read to critique, but it’s kind of rude to dig in and […]
So, most of the people who come to this blog are writers — in the parlance of people who create nothing but billing fictions, “creators of content”. Many people in our shoes are worried about piracy; about people taking copies of our stories and other work, and making them available for free without our permission […]
2011 has been an exciting year for me as a writer. I had my first fiction sale, my first podcast sale, and went to my first convention (Boskone). I won a Codex contest, and did respectably well in another. I signed my first autographs, at Readercon. I bought way too many fountain pens. In terms […]
Here’s a quick one for you, apropos of the holiday. Lots of people have drawn this connection before, but I’m not sure too many of them really considered how deep it goes. Enjoy!
Over on Whatever, John Scalzi pokes a little fun at the folks who (are? profess to be?) thrown out of the Lord of the Rings by the viscosity of the lava in Mount Doom. He makes an excellent point that the suspension of disbelief is a highly personal thing, subject to much head-scratching by observers […]
One of the real joys of writing is getting to see your work interpreted by other people. Cover illustrations are always wonderful — getting to see how a talented artist viewed your characters and world is a real treat. Audio recordings and adaptations are also fun, especially when the production values are as high as, […]
While I haven’t been blogging lately, I’ve had quite a rush of productivity. I wrote a Halloween story that was quite well-received by beta-readers, and I’m about 8k words into a (probably 20k word) novella that I expect to have finished by the end of the month. Rather than do NaNoWriMo this year and wind […]
John P. Murphy 