Author, Futurist, Wordsmith for Hire
I have a new intern, joining the team with another intern I already have been working with from the local college. They do cool things for me that help with some outreach, PR, admin tasks that I struggle to keep up with. New intern came with a notebook and lots of questions for her first…
Ray Bradbury has passed. I saw Twitter and FaceBook fill with people sharing their favorite Bradbury stories. He was a touchstone writer, both for my field and in the larger world. So many were touched by his stories. The first Bradbury stories I encountered were from The Martian Chronicles. It was an awkward first encounter,…
How being an early user of Kickstarter for a fiction book helped me reach fans and rebooted a book series.
One of the problems with talking about writing advice is that different pieces of writing advice hit people at different parts of their journey. It’s often why I think writing advice from someone *just* slightly ahead of where you are in a career can often be the most easy to puzzle apart and get. I’d…
A good friend asked me to write about my pigeons and pellets story I’ve been telling friends for the past year. It goes something like this… When I talk to writers I often reinforce the importance of milestones versus goals. Milestones are things you’d like to have happen to you. Selling a story. Selling a…
I’m deep into working on Arctic Rising at full pace once more, after spending a few weeks with Arctic Rising on a back burner, getting fewer words in per day, as I focused mainly on a novella for a secret project (hopefully you’ll get to hear more about that soon). I’d left the book at…
Pat Rothfuss gives great advice over here for writers: In closing, if you could give one piece of advice to new writers, what would it be? Live somewhere cheap. I beg your pardon? Odds are, it’s going to take you a long time to finish your novel. Then it’s going to take you a long…
Recently I purchased a $234 solid state hard drive. I’ve been waiting for almost three months to buy it. Before that, I knew I didn’t have the wiggle room. I knew I wouldn’t have it for another month, unless one of a handful of promised windfalls due to fiction writing would show up. The windfall…
From my ‘ask me a question‘ entry, I finally get around to answering the two last questions in the queue: James asks: When do you retire (or trunk) a short story? I’m staring at my list of stories, and only a few of them I think are good. Should I trust my own instinct, or…
This is one big frustration that’s been two years in the making, and I feel compelled to blog it up as a data point for other people because I am that guy who tries to shine light into how things work so other people don’t make the mistakes I make. I have all my correspondence…