"In the Leading Edge of Shadow" is a science fiction flash story I wrote recently. It is a testament to the adage that it takes at least two ideas to make a story. One of the ideas in this story occurred to me twelve years ago, but didn't have enough legs by itself. The second idea came to me when I drove under this spectacular storm cloud and ( Read more... )

I don't recall if I've ever mentioned this here before, but I highly recommend "David Farland's Daily Kick in the Pants" for writers. This is a "daily" email that David sends out about writing. It covers writing, editing, publishing, etc. He's even covered the Hollywood angle having spent several years there in the business. I put "daily" in quotes ( Read more... )

I've been silent here for a while mainly because I've been attending to the balance of life and living ( Read more... )

I have not participated in the flash challenges at Liberty Hall in about 63 weeks. Until today that is. I finally managed to get a flash submitted. I'd tried a couple of times in the interim, but always ended up with a hopelessly too long to complete story. Today's is full of errors (upon reading it after submission), and not really "done" by any ( Read more... )

I was playing kiddie chaperone this weekend, and happened to have an hour, wireless access, and a laptop. So, I hopped over to Liberty Hall, and decided to have a go at the 90 minute flash challenge for this weekend. I almost finished a story arc in the hour I actually had, but decided not to post it. I took the kids home, and several hours later ( Read more... )

Ultimately, I didn't make it into the LH end of year challenge. The trigger, however, was fantastic. Obviously, I posted about this recently, but here's the recap of what I got from the exercise.

Story Outline 1:
- This is either one story with two plot lines interwoven, or two serial plot lines told serially. These are set in the same world as a ( Read more... )

I submitted "Company Man" to the Liberty Hall polish challenge a few minutes ago...finally. I'll not say it doesn't need more work, but I'm done with it for now, and looking forward to the critiques.

Now to relax...not.

:-)

It's 3:00AM Sunday morning and I can't sleep. However, I did finally finish the last two scenes of my rewrite of the "Company Man". I also have a print out of all but the last scene, with lots of polish edits on it (but no story changes!). So if the stuff I wrote tonight makes any sense when I get back to it at lunchtime Monday, it's just polish up ( Read more... )

"The Company Man"

( Read more... )

I was working toward getting "Company Man" (aka "Consumer Shopping") into Polish Challenge #13 at Liberty Hall. The deadline is tonight, and I'm not going to make it. It's not for lack of good effort though. My wife pitched in with the editing, rooting out inconsistencies as usual (thank heavens she sees them!), and carving out writing time for me ( Read more... )