Hello! I’m going to try this newsletter thing. All the cool kids are doing it and I want to be cool. Also, I want to build systems to connect with readers that aren’t dependent on fascist billionaires. I’m planning a monthly schedule, with occasional short announcements if they are time sensitive. Making space for creativity is…
Local magazine, Oly Arts, has an article up about the Mud Flat Shorts (mostly fiction) anthology. The reporter spoke to a few of us and included brief profiles and a portion of our conversations.
Along with many other writers included in Mud Flat Shorts, a mostly fiction anthology of short stories, I wrote a post for the Mud Flat Press blog. I share how I got involved in the project and a little about my writing process. If you go over there to read my post (thank you), I…
While I understand that asking to have an account set up so you can login and leave comments is more work for you, the potential commenter, y’all are vastly outnumbered by the spam bots. In an effort to cut down on the comment deleting I have to do regularly, I’m going to a subscriber model.…
April has become the month for gathering feedback on my work in progress, the YA novel about the haunted amusement park. My partner and muse, Mol, was the first to complete the read through and we had several great conversations about their impressions, ideas and suggestions. Through the course of those conversations, I came up…
I have been hard at work writing, writing, writing toward a major milestone – the first complete draft of my WiP, the YA novel involving enby, queer, black, awkward, ghosts, villains, mystical lady magic, and teenage angst. I set a goal of reaching this milestone by the end of March and I hit it on…
There is a Sir Terry Pratchett’s quote that is a part of my personal gospel: the first draft is just you telling the story. The gist is that we should not be self-critical about the first draft. We should blaze ahead with creative abandon rather than get in our own way at such an early…
After a friend reminded me that HBO had created a series based on Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, I picked up my copy of the book. When I first read it, close to its publishing date of 2014, I was reminded of The Stand. The idea of a flu killing most of the…
This week, I spent some quality time finalizing the order of events in my haunted amusement park novel. I’ve got 20 chapters planned, many are in their third draft. A few need to be written whole, probably up to about 20k more words to write, then edit. Knowing my final outline, progression and chapter layout…
I’m working my way through Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft. In chapter 9, Indirect Narration, or What Tells, she warns against the info dump style of telling the reader about the world their are entering. If you’ve read fantasy or sci fi, you know what she’s referring to. That scene early in the book…