Inspired by a blog post by Joe Hill.

These are the 5 things I'd like to try as a writer.

1. A full-length screenplay.

2. An adult novel (my novels up to now have been YA).

3. Start and finish a novel in the span of a month (not a 50K nano novel, but a 75K YA).

4. Complete a short story a week for one year.

5. Write without fear.

Still hard at work on the World Domination novel, tentatively titled THIS WILL GO ON YOUR PERMANENT RECORD. I had a bit of a slog in the middle--middles are especially hard for me, probably because I'm a pantser and not an outliner--but now I'm on the downhill slide. maybe 15k or so more to go and I'll have a working first draft. So, say, in the ( Read more... )

So, yeah. I haven't actively written anything for a little over a week and I'm freaking out. I'm restless, out-of-sorts, and semi-depressed. I feel off-kilter ( Read more... )

This past Saturday I attended a surprise birthday party for my stepdad. Sure, the cake and wine and DJ were fun and all, but towards the end of the festivities I found a newfangled-story-idea-generator that I'm going to patent.

It's called a five-year-old.

The conversation started innocently enough. A boy was asked what he was going to be for ( Read more... )

I'm getting ready to dive in on the rewrite of Stormy Weather (a.k.a. the book to be renamed later). I've gotten some good thinking time in over the past few weeks, and I've brainstormed with some writerly folks and the hubs about  back story and such, so I'm ready to dive in. I'm over my temporary mental hump: "I can't do this/it's broken/if it's ( Read more... )

 So I have the rough draft of Stormy Weather done and off to a few readers. This is the first time I've rewritten a book I'd written before from the ground up, and I have to say it's an odd experience. Going in, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the characters so I thought it wouldn't be too tough. Once I got going, though, I realized I ( Read more... )

My blog post about fitting writing into an already full life is up at the SFWA blog. Be sure to check it out!

A friend pointed me in the direction of this lovely review for Boondocks Fantasy. I think you need to go right out and buy it, and not just because my tale is "enjoyable," but because there are lots of great stories by some really fabulous authors.

I'm an active member of SFWA. Definitely a milestone that I've worked towards, and I'm proud to be a part of the organization.

So, yeah. Last week I hit a wall in my Stormy Weather outline. I'm rewriting/expanding/making awesome a YA ... novella ... I wrote about four years ago. I like the concept and I like the characters, so I wanted to clean 'em up and see what I could do with 'em. I got about 10K in before reworking the outline again. (This is usual for me: outline, ( Read more... )