Back on November 14, a day before my 10th chemotherapy session, I submitted a short story to Chicago Reader's upcoming Fiction Issue. It's the story I mentioned in an earlier post. While it's an Urbis Arcana story, one that features a character readers of my earlier work will recognize, it doesn't really require you to read any of my previous work ( Read more... )

Thanks to a certain Shea Koshan, I recently came across a piece by Ursula (ursulav) Vernon. I confess that I only know her as That Person Who Regularly Shows Up In Non-Cyrillic Livejurnal Top 10 and Isn't a Writer (or Cleolinda).


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Around a week or two ago, someone on my Twitter feed linked to a long of passages where writers describe their characters as "not beautiful" and still pretty attractive, often within a span of a single sentence ( Read more... )

A lot of Urbis Arcana characters are influenced by real people. Jas Morikawa is based on a real person (with some fictional touches added in). Dan Masterson from the recently revised " Still My Ward" was originally inspired by a guy I knew in college. Then, some bits from my dad and some bits from me crept in ( Read more... )

This is one of those things that I've been meaning to write about for weeks, but I haven't been able to find time. And, since i have an hour or two, I figured i might as well try to fit it in now.

It all started with ceilidh_ann's post on The Book Lantern. In it, she talked about what it's like to trying to write her own novel after spending the better part ( Read more... )

Amidst everything else going on, I have been trying to work on a longer Urbis Arcana story I mentioned a month ago, and I ran into an unexpected problem.

Originally, the first chapter was supposed to take place in a McDonalds near Jefferson Park Transit Center. As most people who've read my work know, I'm fond of using real locations, and the actual ( Read more... )

My approach to Urbis Arcana stories has been largely scattershot. After over a year of writer's block, I was happy to get an inspiration to write anything fictional, so I just sort of took whatever short story idea popped into my head and tried to write about it. And while I've always had a sense of where everything was ultimately going, I didn't ( Read more... )

About two weeks ago or so, I started writing the Margaret Okuda story, because it kept on nagging and nagging on the back of my skull with dogged persistence. Margaret is a character that migrated from story idea to story idea. Originally, she was a second-generation Japanese-American girl with a businessman father who got her hands on a Total ( Read more... )