I have too many irons in my creative fire right now.
It’s my own fault. There were a couple of months recently when I was working a lot and didn’t have time to write (correction: didn’t make time to write). Without conscious direction, my creative subconscious likes to go all monkey-mind on me, and just putter around in the workshop, tinkering with this and that project or half-formed idea lying about in various stages of completion. Continue reading “My Mind is a Raging Torrent*”
It’s not that I hate you, it’s just that you’re not good enough yet.
Okay, I admit it. I kind of hate you.
The problem is that I need you to do a lot of things very quickly. Partly this is for reasons of craft, but mostly it’s because nobody knows who I am yet. I don’t have a name. So I’ve got to grab you, the reader, right away. I’ve got to get you hooked, let you know where you are, where you might be going. Who’s after you and what they want. I’ve got to set expectations that you’re going to want to see fulfilled.
Then I have to fulfill them, but Continue reading “Dear Opening Paragraph:”
As you may or shortly will know, I have resumed work on The Victorius Revolution, the novella-turned-novel I started last summer for the Clarion Write-a-thon. It’s been really quite liberating, for a lot of different reasons. First of all, I had already charted some of the plot as backstory to a different novel, and I had spent a little time with the protagonist in earlier drafts of that novel, so I wasn’t starting from scratch with all that. Second, the story itself marks a return to a very comfortable form for me, a sort of thinking man’s action movie, after a couple of years of experimenting with different voices and genres and formats, all of which was very helpful in terms of growing as a writer but was also very hard, as I was doing things that come less naturally to me than some other things. Third, and perhaps most important, when I started the project I gave myself license to relax and have fun with it and really just cut loose, to write the thing in my own voice, if that makes any sense.
Best of all, I’m pleased with the results. And I’ve decided to take the plunge and self-release it when it’s finished.
Nobody really knows what’s up with the future of publishing. I’ve done a fair bit of reading and thinking about it (Kristine Katherine Rusch in particular has been extremely helpful), and while I’m not above going the traditional publishing route should that avenue offer itself, I think the distribution tools that are available to writers nowadays are sufficiently game-changing that it’s worth it to roll the dice and self-release as an indie author.
So here’s my plan: Continue reading “My Indie Writer Business Plan”
I have always been a rebellious sort, and in the absence of an external authority against whom to rebel, I will often rebel against myself, and start not wanting to do the things I know that I should be doing, that I want to be doing, even, but I’m just so bloody cussed sometimes that I can’t help it. Take, for instance, the novel I have recently resumed writing, The Victorius Revolution. Continue reading “Writing, Revising, Rebelling”
I started the original draft of Cowboys and Indians almost a year and a half ago, in December of 2010. I remember the date because I had just written the first 60k words of Company Girl for NaNoWriMo and I needed to take a break before I went back and finished it (which I did; it is currently trunked and awaiting a rewrite). It’s either a rewrite or a sequel to one of the first short stories I ever wrote, called The Ghost Burn, which was one of my application stories for the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.
Pardon me. I just realized that it’s been almost exactly two years since those frenzied weeks and had a small headsplosion at all the things that have happened since. I’ll be back in a moment.
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