Hello friends. A lot has happened and is happening, so grab a comfy seat and I’ll catch you up Clocking Out to Concentrate on the Work On Friday the 3rd, I logged off of my work computer, shut down the monitors and began a two week writing retreat. For the first week of my retreat,…
Sad News As many of you know, tragedy struck my household about a week ago. Percy, our sweet fluffy boy, was hit by a vehicle and killed. We only know that because of the kindness of strangers who gathered him up and took him to Animal Services. Because he had a chip, I got a…
Adventures with Words, January 2023 – from CK Combs, Author I used to do New Year’s Resolutions, back when I was younger and hadn’t learned to choose my battles well. I piled up goals and ambitions, listed anything I could think of that I believed would improve my life. And every year there would come…
Adventures with Words, December 2022 – from CK Combs, Author Hello! Welcome to the second newsletter. Thank you for coming along for the ride. I hope you’re doing well. I’m keeping my head above the water, though the pace of December activities and the dark and cold make me want to hibernate under cozy covers…
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…
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…