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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Early on after I started writing again, I joined an online critique group, Critters. I got a lot of good feedback from it, but only one critique was so good that I still remember it more than a year later. It was from a pro writer who correctly pointed out that the story wasn’t really […]
I had wanted to put up a thread earlier for my story The Body and the Bomb, published back in April by Crossed Genres, but I don’t think that page is the appropriate place for me to put my thoughts about the story — I don’t entirely subscribe to the “death of the author” or […]
Just about every writer has heard the advice, “Kill your darlings” (and if you haven’t, you just did). The advice has come to have an almost mythic quality to it. Hell, someone even titled a movie about a writer after it. The “kill your darlings” formulation apparently comes from Faulkner (who graciously specified that this […]
Distillation of spirits is a wonderful process in which one starts with an alcoholic liquid and proceeds to remove as much of the water as possible in order to concentrate the alcohol and flavors. This is made possible by the fact that different liquids have different boiling and freezing points. The simplest method for doing […]
I’ve mentioned here before that when I was in high school and college I wrote pretty prolifically. Not great fiction, but plenty of short stories and most of a novel. I submitted one story in high school, got a half-page rejection (Asimov’s, I think? I can’t find it) and more or less kept my stories […]
Good news, everyone! My short story, “The Body and the Bomb” has been published over at Crossed Genres for this month’s issue on Mystery, linked from the front page. If you haven’t seen it yet, I hope you enjoy it! (And don’t just read mine! There’s some great stuff there)
John P. Murphy 