Sunday the calendar switches from October to November, and with it comes the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNo WriMo). The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days – or an average of 1,667 words a day. For some this seems like a Herculean feat, particularly in a short…
-
-
One of my 38 things this year was to attend a convention with a strong writer’s track. I have booked convention tickets for GenCon, arranged time off work, booked airline tickets and a hotel, found a roommate, and the last step in my pre-convention excitement, I have signed up…
-
One of the resources in my writer’s toolbox is the I Should Be Writing podcast by Mur Lafferty. Occasionally over the years she has brought on writer Matt Wallace for a segment called “Good Cop, Bad Cop” where they would address listener questions. Starting in 2015 Mur and Matt began…
-
Entry from my journal May 16, 2015 Just thinking of all the writing classes I’ve taken in the past few years – and then looking at my actual writing output for the same time. Maybe my focus is skewed. Or am I so afraid I won’t live up to the…
-
In a conversation with my writing mentor yesterday, I came to the realization that I use the same approach to character creation whether I am designing a character for a role playing adventure, or crafting the protagonist of my next story.* I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, a character is…
-
I am a fan of the podcast Writing Excuses, so much so that I camped out on the computer to snag one of the 30 seats in their inaugural Out Of Excuses Writing Retreat in 2013. I learned a lot from Brandan, Dan, Howard and Mary that week, and each…
-
Every year since 2003, I have participated in (well, at least signed up for) NaNo WriMo (National Novel Writing Month, for the lay-person). The goal is simple, write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. What! Are you kidding? Fifty-THOUSAND words? Is that even possible? The answer is, for…
-
At the end of August I attended an online workshop, Short Story Intensive with Mary Robinette Kowal. The ultimate assignment for the class was to write a short story based on all the previous work we’d done. We had ninety minutes. I was pretty proud of my first draft, and…
-
Once again I have a Betta fish – though after the last one I had grown cold on the idea of having a fish in my office (to the point where I got rid of all the tanks and supplies I had used on my previous underwater companions). But a…
-
A few weeks ago I was going through containers in my office, and I decided to pull out all of my journals, morning pages and writing notebooks. When I was done, I was surrounded by no fewer than 40 various sized notebooks, plus another 30 or so “fit in your…