Reprinted with permission from thisblogblank.wordpress.com, 12/19/2018. After watching my wife work on a couple of her oil paintings, I’ve come to realize that producing a work of fiction is very similar to creating a painting. Too many new writers have unrealistically low expectations about how good a first draft can be due to an overabundance…
M and I have been talking for some time about the apparent lovefest that publishing as an industry seems to have with darkness. I’m not talking about traditional light versus dark, good v. evil themes. I’m speaking specifically about the mistaken idea that the only way to make a character’s life interesting is to throw…
I stood stupidly for three beats, with a voice inside my head screaming to pick fun. She needed to be interviewed, and I wanted to interview her something fierce. I wanted to interview her all night long and hard—to interrogate all of her sexy little bits starting with those pretty feet and ending with the…
When I wrote my Sci-Fi female lead, I wanted her to be sexy. Silly me, I defined sexy using the following criteria: Smart, at least in terms of problem solving and the ability to think during stress Strong, physically, mentally, and emotionally Feminine, because strength and femininity aren’t mutually exclusive Clothed, in things other than…
Every piece I write seems to have its own soundtrack. I used to attribute it to mood, but it’s more than that. When I go to write a poem, story, or novel, I simply can’t write without the right music. I usually don’t know what that music is until I start writing. Still, the words…
My next book. “One of these nights at about twelve o’clock this whole earth’s gonna reel and rock… things thay’ll tremble and cry fer pain for the Lord’s gonna come in his heaven aeroplane.” — Heavenly Aeroplane A sparse, but enthusiastic crowd sits in the aluminum stands of a high school baseball game. Along the…
This was an ordinary day, at an ordinary time, in an ordinary place. There once was a man, who needed to reach the sea. For years, he’d been tormented by the People. They bullied him in school; they never understood when he spoke, for he wasn’t from wherever it was he’d drifted to when he…
I stumbled across a few strange parallels between this book I’m reading and my own works. There are the normal things you find, like character names that are the same, but the one that struck me was the entrance of a fashion designer. The author clearly found inspiration from the same source I used for…
The first draft of Jeanne Dark is in the books. Now to take a month off to experience life again. After that, I’m on holiday for 2 weeks. Hopefully, my life will clear up by then and I can focus on joy and publication. Woo Hoo. This isn’t my best book, but it was the…
By my estimation, I’m 98,000 words into a 108,000 word book. My detectives have solved the case, and now all that’s left is to try to apprehend the culprit. Oh, that it were so easy. I knocked out about 3,000 words tonight that I think will end up being increased instead of tightened. I’ll be…
Raw, Naked Art 