It's hard to measure progress in writing. Quality improvements are what we should really be going for, of course, but it's almost impossible to measure quality improvement. We can measure quantity of writing, at least in rought drafts. Words per day is pretty simple to track and I find that setting a minimum goal is a good way to motivate myself. ( Read more... )

I'm in the fourth day of Char's Kindle Scout campaign. So far, it's running at a little over twice the number of page-views that my failed previous campaign for Snapshot had at this point, which hopefully means so far, so good.If you haven't already nominated Char, I would appreciate it if you did. The link is ( Read more... )

I've often thought that TV has a lot of parallels to the book marketplace. For both TV and books, this a time of unprecedented amounts of material and choice, but it's also a time where it's incredibly difficult to find the stuff you're interested in before it goes away. During the months after my knee surgery when I couldn't do much else, I did a ( Read more... )

Not sure how useful this one is, but I tried it: The very long sentence:I wonder if it ends now, on an ice planet with no life now and only the slightest of feeble hints of life in times past, and those probably the product of my imagination, trying to dredge up hope where the crushed remnants of my spaceship should have ended that hope long ago, ( Read more... )

Dear Martin ( Read more... )

As many off you know, I've been recovering from a major knee operation for the last month and a half. I should be able to do almost everything I normally do on a day-to-day basis in a month or two and make very close to a full recovery in six months to a year. In the meantime, I'm coping with problems, enjoying rare tastes of things I took for ( Read more... )

My on-line presence has always been sporadic, with active periods when I'm between big projects, followed by long periods where I'm busy enough that something has to go and that something is usually blog posts and other on-line activities. So no blog posts for a few weeks to a month isn't too exceptional for me ( Read more... )

I'm a guy, and make-up is a spectator thing for me, but I've raised two daughters, so I've watched them both start out with amateurish clown like efforts at makeup, gradually getting more sophisticated. It strikes me that writing has quite a bit in common with putting on makeup.

First, most people start out making their efforts too obvious. Too ( Read more... )

This is a reprint from Gather, I believe.

In another life long ago I was a computer programmer, on mainframes, near the end of the era when computers were hulking things that sat in air conditioned rooms with mysterious attendants. I came in as that style of computing was getting shoved aside by more agile, more capable desktops. I still dink around ( Read more... )

I can write fast when I get going, usually completing a novel rough draft in maybe six weeks. I can do the rough cut revisions pretty quickly too, two or three passes to tighten the rough draft. Then comes the fine detail work of getting the words right, punching up the scenes that should be exciting so that they really are exciting, capturing the ( Read more... )