When I need to let my brain’s background processes figure out a story element or untie a knot in a chapter, I take a walk in the place you see pictured above. It never fails to work. In other news, I just turned in the edits for BALLISTIC, second in the Palladium Wars series,…
Category: writing.
Running a few Sharpies dry
Sitting down this afternoon to sign a bunch of bookplates for hardcovers of AFTERSHOCKS. I am signing these instead of the actual books because the alternative would be to ship me the hardcovers. Those come about 25 to a box, and I have to do 1,800 signatures, so they’d have to send 72 boxes of…
Dispatch from the desk
The most enjoyable words for a writer to read are “Pay To The Order Of…”, and the most enjoyable words for a writer to put down on the page are “THE END”. I’ve been quiet on here because I’ve spent the last few weeks finishing BALLISTIC, the second book in the Palladium Wars series. But…
Interview with the local newspaper
My local newspaper, the Valley News, interviewed me a few days ago, and you can read the whole thing here. It’s a very good piece that stays true to the facts, and I enjoyed sitting for the questions (with journalist Sarah Earle) and the pictures (with photographer Rick Russell) very much.
When characters take the wheel
I have a blog post up on the Wild Cards blog, in which I talk about the relationship between character and plot, and attempt an answer to the question of which is more important to a good narrative. I’ve been a member of the consortium since late 2015, and since then, I’ve turned out two…
Life after FaceTwitStagram
A little over a month ago, I pulled the plug on all my remaining social media accounts and went full-on cold turkey on everything. And by “cold turkey”, I mean that I didn’t leave myself the option of reactivating those accounts. Twitter and Facebook make it intentionally hard to leave the service altogether, for obvious…
Writing and the Internet
I have to come to realize that over the last few years, the Internet has had a profoundly corrosive effect on my professional output and occasionally even my emotional health. This effect has been especially severe in two areas: social media and email, both of which basically constituted my consent to being easily and directly…
New blog entry at Wild Cards World
In other Wild Cards news, there’s a new post on the Wild Cards World blog, this one by Michael Cassutt: “Word-building in Wild Cards” (yes, you read that correctly.) I’ve talked about writing for Wild Cards before (most extensively in this post from a while back), but one thing I only touched on in that…
Writing with Ulysses.app
I’ve been a long-time Scrivener user for over a decade, but for the last year or so, I’ve been migrating my work to Ulysses more and more, and right now I think I am at the point where I’ll be using it exclusively. Ulysses is a writing app like Scrivener, and it has much…
Love, Death & Robots
The first season of Love, Death & Robots, the new animated anthology put together by Tim Miller and David Fincher, kicked off on Netflix today. https://www.wired.com/story/love-death-and-robots-review/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/netflixs-love-death-and-robots-is-a-sex-filled-sci-fi-extravaganza-featuring-latex-strippers-and-killing-hitler Two of the episodic shorts in that project are based on stories I wrote. The first is an adaptation of the Frontlines short story “Lucky Thirteen”. It stars…