I just sent in my fifth fiction submission of the new year. If you count the one that’s waiting on a February submissions opening, I have five stories actively on the market. That’s not bad, but looking at what’s in progress, I’m going to have trouble keeping that up: I’m pretty thoroughly stalled out on […]
I had a fascinating conversation with a friend of mine the other day about the preferred term for someone who writes. I had always had a vague impression that the term “author” was the more pretentious term for writing (particularly fiction) but my friend (who is free to identify herself in comments; I just can’t […]
Just for fun, I thought I’d post a scene that I’ve been working on. This is from early in the novel, so while it contains important plot points, it’s not much of a spoiler. It takes place aboard the Colonial Union Ship William S. Halliday, which is currently docked with the Deep Space Telescopic Array […]
It does not take the most incisive literary analysis to say that murder mysteries are about death. Someone turns an alive person into a dead one, other people react to that, and a detective (sometimes as the representative of larger society) examines the death in an effort to learn how and why. There is an […]
Looking back on my last few weeks of blog posts, one could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve spent more time writing about writing than actually writing! So, maybe a little update is in order. I have three primary projects right now, and have made some progress on all of them. First, I’m rewriting a […]
(Update: I’ve posted more on this subject here) In my professional life, I deal with metrics on a regular basis. Computer and network security in particular is (in my opinion) struggling with the transition from a qualitative to quantitative field. And hey, at heart I’m a quant: I find it easier to improve aspects of […]
How appropriate that I have a crick in my neck! 2010 is the year I got serious about writing: No more fiddling around writing (just) for my friends, no more getting one rejection and sulking for months. All together, I figure I wrote about 50,000 words of fiction this year. I didn’t sell a damn thing, but […]
In a sense, I’ve been writing for a long time. I started writing little stories for myself in grade school (mostly inspired by television), and by the time I got to high school I was writing short stories to pass around to my friends. I even wrote a few one-act plays that were performed. In […]
The always-fascinating Jim Macdonald wrote a post some years back on the Absolute Write forums (you’re a member, right?) on the subject of becoming an instant expert in a subject.* There’s nothing hugely ground-breaking here, and yet… nobody ever really bothers to spell out this process, do they? To summarize (though you should read his post): […]
Spent part of the evening talking over my short story The Body and the Bomb with Marko. This is an Inspector Crandall mystery, one I’ve several I’ve written, in which I had experimented with having a co-investigator, local Constable Nouri. One of his comments sort of threw me for a loop: I don’t really need […]
