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Running on the beach and making peace with the water gods
Making peace with the waves, and finding deeper meaning through personal achievements.
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Look into my brain, why don’t you?
Pinterest and a poem from Watcher of the Skies.
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I didn’t have much to tell him
I didn’t have much to tell him. “I fought in the war,” I said. “I had a child. Though I have not watched him grow, for I was not well acquainted with his mother. Not properly, anyway. I fear I have disappointed you in not living a truly upright existence.” He laughed. “As if I could tame you, Joss! You, creature of lightning and water and energy. Gods, if I could ever bottle but a fraction of your essence, or whatever it makes you what you are, I would be a king among men. You never have fit into my understanding of the world. Nor by Diana’s nor Mary’s law.…
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It’s not fun until someone loses an eye.
I grossed myself out today during writing. I don’t know if it’s because the AC is broken and it’s 90 degrees up here and the humidity is through the roof, but I apparently needed to outdo myself in fiction. It was one of those weird moments where I’d planned for the scene to go one way and it took a sharp, brutal detour in a direction I hadn’t anticipated. Like the title says, someone literally loses an eye in the process. Of his own volition. I can get away with a bit that I normally couldn’t in Dev’s narrative, because he’s on this Dante-esque journey. I’ve got to hit some…
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Movin’ right along… footloose and fancy free…
Finally had a chance to do a little bit of writing today. The weekend was horrible, and writing was not an option. I had an epically bad reaction to medication on Saturday (I am a lightweight of unparalleled proportions) and was in no shape to be writing. I mean, I do have a drug addict in the book, and maybe (just maybe) I could have mustered something insightful or interesting. But honestly, just looking at the computer made me feel ill. So, none of that. However, progress is continuing. Not a huge day for output, but just under 4K for the day and I’m not complaining at all. I had…
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Six Ways Twitter Can Make You A Better Writer
Many people consider Twitter solely for networking purposes, for meeting people with common interests and conversing. And while that’s a big part of it, Twitter can also be a very useful tool for improving your writing. When I first started building my Twitter follow list, I started with a lot of writers. And soon I discovered, mostly through feeds of people like Jay Lake and Paul Jessup, the #wip hashtag. Easy enough, WIP stands for “work in progress”. Basically, writers sample little 140 character or less sections from their work, sharing it with their friends and followers. Not every writer does this (either some don’t like the attention it brings, while…
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(re)writing blind
I’m in the process of a complete rewrite, the most extensive I’ve ever done. It’s true, first novels aren’t the best novels. And my first novel was written three times before I put it away for a while. But it kept pestering me until I realized that the characters, the story, and the plot (if tweaked considerably) were still worth the trouble. The exact trouble is rewriting a 75K exceptionally mediocre story into something around 120K that has a lot more grit and substance. What I’ve done is written blind. I didn’t even read the last draft, completed some three or four years ago. Oh, it’s still around, and occasionally…
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The self-conscious fantasy epic.
This morning I read a piece in the Guardian called When the Lord of the Rings doesn’t cut it: Confessions of a fantasy junkie, and found it rather amusing. In particular this bit (which makes us all sound a bit like Gollum, I think): I understand the pain of the addict. At the turn of a page, weeks of total immersion in a fantasy world come to an end and mundane reality is waiting. Fantasy is epic because that is how we like it. But like any narcotic substance, fantasy operates on the law of diminishing returns. Once you’ve see a few dozen dragons, you’ve seen them all. The fantasy…
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Glut, glut, glut.
I am trying to be candid here. I have too many words. Not counting finished drafts, I have somewhere around 230K of unfinished business. This is either work in process (currently I am writing two separate books) or words that need to be edited. This morning I thought I’d total it up, for reasons of amusement. But now? Looking at it I’ve got to wonder what the hell it is I’m getting at. This started when I got frustrated editing a first draft. Then I decided to do something else; which lead to something else… which means, ah, what the hell? Self: Stop this grumblefest. You need to look on…
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What the heck am I doing?
The answer is writing. Writing and writing, and podcasting a little. In spite of the failure of last week, which isn’t really a failure at all but a disappointment, I’ve been busy putting the oldest story I think is worth telling back in order. It’s a bit like turning a 50-piece puzzle into a 1,000 piece puzzle. The picture is similar, but the pathways are different, and there’s lots more to the whole. I call it editing, since it’s technically a rewrite, but honestly it feels more like writing. Writing characters I created when I was still a teenager can be a little surreal though. I had the concept early,…
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Judge a book by its title
Having somewhere around four titled works, I often feel like a total newbie. Hell, I feel like a total newbie most of the time with the whole publishing thing. I was once told I could sell anything, and that would help me in life, yet for the life of me I can’t figure out why trying to “sell” my own novel is like getting splinters shoved under my fingernails. Now that you have that image, let me get back to what I was talking about. We toil in the dark, writing our novels and minor opuses. We think we’re doing amazing things, powerful things, and maybe we are. But we’re…
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Play it again, Frodo: why I love a remake
There are too many purists in the world. Too many folks who cling to original books, movies, songs, rallying for the acknowledgement that their beloved version is The Best That Ever Was. Hollywood is “out of ideas”, books are “recycled”. Like this is a bad thing? The thing is, we’re always telling the same story. It might be a different medium, the genders might be switched, the religions and locations different, but from the Dawn of Humanity, we’ve been obsessed with the same stories: stories of love, hate, revenge, honor, sacrifice. And quite often, we get it wrong the first time. And even more often, we get it worse the…
