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A note of appreciation to Mssr. Samuel Montgomery-Blinn
The first time I met Sam Montgomery-Blinn in person, it was 2009, and he got me very, very drunk on Fat Tire beer. Not my usual fare, but he was buying. I was nervous as hell after my first public reading, so not really arguing. I’m still not sure how I got invited to the reading that night (it included actual writers like Mur Lafferty and Jeff VanderMeer) being in such an nascent state in my writing career, but I’m pretty sure it had to do with Sam. They wanted someone else local, I suppose, so I packed up my favorite shoes and read from the novel I had been…
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The Perils of Early Success: Or, Writing With the Pointy End
So I started blogging “as a real writer” at the very beginning of 2008 in order to share a draft of my novel, The Aldersgate, with the world at large. I had already written two drafts, and then decided to start again and record the new chapters and launch them out into the world for feedback. It’s a steampunk western sort of fantasy story, with low magic and high politics and many point of views. You know; as you will. While I commenced blogging in that first year or so, I had pretty immediate success with my short story writing and network building, and I felt like I was on…