author
-
Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer
I started writing my first novel when I was twelve years old. I was thirty-three when I completed my first rough draft. That’s twenty years of wanting to do something and not knowing how. Twenty years of failure and frustrations and giving up. A big part of the problem is that I didn’t know what… Continue reading
-
A Thread of Hope
Getting published is a wild ordeal. Let’s forget, for just a moment, the wacky adventure that writing a book can be… once you’re done with that, you’ll find yourself at the beginning of a path, not at the end. And where you want to go is over the horizon and out of sight. What you… Continue reading
-
Post hoc learning
Over the past 20 years, I’ve begun and abandoned at least seven or eight books. Usually after a single day of writing. And these repeated failures had me convinced that writing a book is a mystical art practiced only by the lucky few. Either that, or I just didn’t have the correct tools. With a… Continue reading
-
Books aren’t written, they’re edited.
Looking back and forth between my original draft and my current manuscript seems to bear this out. The former was a story, fit to be heard, but not read. If we still lived in the age of Oral Tradition, I’d have released the bugger unchanged and relied on future bards to tweak the nonsense into… Continue reading
-
Approaching limits, and not asymptotically.
There’s a lot of satisfaction in studying Molly Fyde. The more I read about her, her companions, and their exploits… the better I feel I know them. Every fact, diary entry, battle report, psychological review, transcribed log, map, photograph and schematic snaps perfectly together, gradually revealing a vista that is breathtaking in parts, heartbreaking in… Continue reading