I’ve been working, on and off, on a mystery novel through the summer, as I’ve posted before. It’s coming along (about 5,000 words written that I haven’t thrown out already), but the writing is slow because, ultimately, I’m kind of unhappy with my outline, etc. etc. It’s stalled. I had been thinking about doing NaNoWriMo, […]
I am home. I am at my desk with a view of the neighbor’s tree and its green leaves turned to gold. I have had my moment of wondering whether the last week really happened. (Do not worry, the size of my unread inbox quickly disabused me of that cliche) There is a lot to […]
Had a nice writing session this evening. Not the thousand words I was looking for (*Jedi wave*) but a respectable 700 or so. I wrote one scene I’m particularly happy-for-a-first-draft with, and thought I’d post it, just for fun: “It’s like…” Larrimer trailed off, then shook his head and sat back. He watched Crandall drink. […]
The post title is a direct quote of a friend’s 3-year old, who asked her mother the above question when told she was having chicken for dinner. (I like this kid) But it turns out to not just be funny but I think good advice for me when I’m writing science fiction. See, one of […]
A quick update, as I haven’t posted in a while: I’ve been outlining, and (finally) writing, working on that work-in-progress novel. Sure enough, that means that my brain has been feverishly coming up with other awesome ideas that would be a ton of fun to work on. Endnote has been useful for this, as has […]
I’ve gotten a fair bit of feedback from the short stories I’ve put out for critique. On the one hand, I hear flattering things about my writing, which is nice. People seem to appreciate the mystery aspect of the stories. But I hear some of the same criticisms over and over: the characters are not […]
No, I don’t want bad SF. I want good SF — but about economics, the “dismal science.” As part of my side hobby of world-building, I’ve been collecting SF-oriented papers by economics like Paul Krugman and Robin Hanson. Hanson’s page (linked left) is a great starting point. There are some fantastic ideas there. But what […]
Started on Chapter 1 over the weekend. Took a long damn time to put those first words on paper, but once I started writing, I could barely keep up. It’s funny: I’d been struggling for a while with one of the weaker aspects of the plot in the planning stages and never came up with […]
“There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.” — S.S. Van Dine, “Twenty […]
I’m pretty evenly split, in writing, between writing on my laptop and writing in notebooks. This occasionally bothers me: I kind of prefer the notebooks, but I have a bad habit of misplacing them. I have a Wacom tablet, but have found it to be (for these purposes) the worst of both worlds: non-portable and […]
