It Begins…

So I’m thinking, this morning, about how I’m going to start this thing. I know, I probably should have done this a while back, but, well, life’s been pretty engaging lately, and so here I am, not quite procrastinating yet, since I haven’t finished my coffee and oatmeal. But pretty soon I will be.

Given how much the story revolves around my protagonist, Sergeat Lee Victorius, it seems like the first thing I need is an establishing shot, as it were; something to give the reader a sense of who he is (or, rather, was, before his involuntary tour of duty) as well as some sense of the world he lives in. I’m thinking maybe a brief montage of his life before the war, his (possibly wrongful) arrest, and the trial where his extenuating circumstances are ignored by the judge for reasons so patently unjust and unfair as to make a reader’s blood boil.

Alternately, I could just throw the reader right into some kind of exciting sci-fi military action, with small arms fire and explosions going off in the near distance as our protagonist engages in some hard-nosed derring-do and perhaps loses a beloved companion to the vagaries of war. Continue reading “It Begins…” →

2011 Clarion Write-a-thon

It’s official. As per my secret plan all along, I have signed up for the 2011 Clarion Write-a-thon.

It’s difficult to express the full impact the Clarion Writers’ Workshop has had on my writing, both as career and as practice. It really was a transformative experience, on a par with anything else I’ve ever done.

So, given the opportunity to give something back, I suspect it’s not surprising that I’m not only willing but eager to do so.

(It probably doesn’t hurt that having some kind of outside frame for big projects is something I find quite helpful.)

So here’s the deal. Continue reading “2011 Clarion Write-a-thon” →

Summer Writing Schedule

One of the problems with having such an active little monkey brain as I do is that I am almost constantly overwhelmed by shiny new ideas for stories and projects, occasionally to the detriment of the projects I’m already working on. A few weeks ago I made a summer writing schedule, and I did my absolute bestest to scale back my ambitions to a more reasonable scope than can usually compass them.

Guess how that worked out. Continue reading “Summer Writing Schedule” →

Welcome to the Soft Apocalypse

As part of my ongoing plan to achieve world domination, or at least some small recognition as a writer of fictions and other things, I’ve created this spiffy new website and blog.

As time goes by, I’ll be filling it up with all sorts of wonderful things, writing about writing and the writer’s life, pimping my work wherever it appears, and even posting stories and novel excerpts for you to read without having to pay any money for them.

Lots of interesting things on the horizon, including a reading with my writers’ group Horrific Miscue, at Seattle’s Inner Chapters Bookstore Cafe on June 30th (a benefit for victims of the Japanese earthquake), and the 2011 Clarion Write-a-thon, where I’ll spend the six weeks of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop writing a novella/short novel called The Victorius Revolution and hopefully raising a couple of bucks for the workshop, which like so many good and worthwhile things is chronically short on funding to carry out its mission.

There will, of course, be much more to come, and I expect I’ll be posting about all of the things I’ve just mentioned much more extensively soon. But for now, welcome to the Soft Apocalypse, and I hope to see you here again many times as time goes by.