Tuesday, October 30, 2007
For the past couple of years I’ve been peeking at the membership page every now and then, checking my publications, sighing heavily and clicking away. I suspect many do that… At any rate, I finally received (yes, a bit late in the year) a copy of my contract for “The Four Hundred Thousand”, and on [...]
Thursday, October 25, 2007
. I did something stupid the past couple of days. I started reading a massive amount of journals and blogs by both professional and neopro writers. I try to stay away from most writers/writing-related blogs, because all it does is depress me deeply, but every now and then I get caught up in some kind [...]
. I’ll spend this weekend same as the last – light on the noveling, heavy on synopsis (part two), and continuing to wrestle something publishable out of my mundane-sf story. It’s very, very important that I finish the story, almost moreso than the novel. I know that sounds insane, but I tend to abandon story [...]
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
. This weekend I fleshed out the first third of the novel with a very detailed outline, and much to my relief, it didn’t suck. That is to say, I can now confirm that I have a pretty solid novel on my hands – or will have, when it’s finished. I managed to de-emphasize the [...]
Saturday, October 13, 2007
. This weekend I won’t be writing anything except a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline of the novel, as I’m now at the point where I’m just sort of floating along without any direction. I don’t want to get halfway through the ms only to realize that I have to go back and insert some new thread [...]
. And here’s a small sample from the first chapter. Nothing too complex or weird, just some descriptive language that will probably have to be cut in the final draft. ********************************************************************* And not long after the mountains slipped away, telephone lines crowned the high blue skies, racing me through towns too small for names. I [...]
. I’m still sort of feeling my way around the story. I’ve been writing out of sequence, bits and pieces of things that will go into different parts of the novel, trying to figure out where everything is headed. I’ve been doing this because 1) it’s how I tend to write anything, and 2) because [...]
Yep, there’s the start of the novel, in all its eensy glory. It’s a bit more than I thought I’d write – there was a moment last night, right after the first 800 words, when I sat in my chair for a good hour, without a single clue as to what to write next. I [...]