I am in the midst of the second draft of the novel I created during NaNoWriMo. My goal is a chapter a week. I started during the first week of January and I’m got three chapters into second draft, so it’s going well. It feels like a good pace, a pace I can sustain. The…
I’m watching The Stand on CBS. I read the book way back in my early adulthood. I also watched the 1994 TV series. The story made an indelible impression on me. The haunting and revolting image of 99% of the population dead, unattended and rotting. The idea of a world almost empty of people (plus…
I found out about Elizabeth Lesser’s book Cassandra Speaks through Brene’ Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast. The book intrigued me because it promised to speak to the parts of the human story – history – that have been silenced, suppressed or unasked for. The subtitle is ‘When women are the storytellers, the human story changes’. I…
This is day 17 and the minimum target for today is 28,339 words. My word count today is 35,198. At this rate, I’ll hit 50k on November 24th, 6 days ahead of schedule. The key this year has been the pre-planning. I’ve always been a pantser for this event and now I can understand why…
Along with thousands of other wrimos, I’ve completed 8 days of novel writing as part of National Novel Writing Month, popularly known as NaNoWriMo. At the close of my writing session today, I was at 15,490 total words; keeping at a pace of 1700+ per day with some 2k days sprinkled in. To reach the…
NaNoWriMo2020 is now just days away. I started last week with a lot of options for which story take on during my month-long quest for 50K words. One idea was to expand on the story of Merton, the 4 year old who murdered his nanny to open a portal to another dimension and is actually…
There are a lot of popular myths about trans people, from the ridiculous to the hopeful. There is the ‘born in the wrong body’ trope – as though our real bodies are out there somewhere waiting for us to discover them. So where are they? Are they wandering around with an equally dislocated inhabitant animating…
I just pushed the button on a smut story submission for Nerve Endings: Short Fiction Addressing Trans and Non-Binary Experiences of Sex, Sexuality, and Relationships. It’s the first story I’ve submitted for an anthology since the cluster of submissions I made in 2015 (all of which were published). On the one hand, I really like…
I was listening to a song and got a familiar longing. The song described a place where the singer wanted to go fishing, and watch the sun go down over the hills. Something in the combination of the music and the lyrics struck a cord in me and had me thinking of places I longed…
What is the ‘staycation’ equivalent of having an ‘at-home writing retreat’? Whatever it’s called, that’s how I spent the weekend of 9/12-9/13. My goal was to spend those days brainstorming ideas, sorting through them to determine which were short, medium and long term projects, and then to choose some and determine goals, milestones and schedules.…