National Kicking Back and Taking it Easy Month

It’s NaNoWriMo time, and the forums and chat waves are rife with writers who plan to finish their masterpiece novel of American literature in thirty short days.  I’ve done National Novel Writers Month myself and found it… generated mixed results for me. The positive:  I wrote a novel!  Yeah me!  I write my 50,000 word…

Secret Agency Man

First up today:  if you have a Reddit account, please run over to the Fantasy Writer’s forum and shoot my short story, The Gown, an upvote.  I’m trying to win a writer’s contest, the Fantasy Writer’s Spooky October contest, which will earn me nothing at all other than my own self-pride.  Yes, I’m totally shilling…

My Name is Hard… Too Hard…

I see this all the time and its beginning to irk me.  There are lots of forums where writers can share info, thoughts, ideas, etc.  Inevitably a large number want to share the first few pages of their work in progress, get some critiques from folks on their direction and writing style.  Since I write…

Skinning a Mole

Ah, my wife.  She is my muse, that’s for sure.  Yesterday I received a super early Christmas gift, a leather bound journal that I can write thoughts and story ideas in and carry around with me.  A little big for my pocket, but still pretty damned awesome.  Marry a thoughtful woman, it’s a wonderful thing.…

Links to the Future

It’s October 23, 2015.  Marty McFly finally made it to the future two days ago, and you couldn’t turn around but get smacked in the face with another person asking “Where’s my damn hoverboard?!”  Full disclosure: I was one of those idiots.  I’m not perfect, damn it. My future is not written yet, and I…

Contesting the Results

Well, I was going to take part in a writing contest on another site.  I was a tad nervous, given that there were already many posts, and that users were already upvoting many of them, but I figured there would be a way for the site to properly address this issue.  I submitted my Halloween…

October is for Ghoulish Editing

As I finish up the first revision (second?  third?  it feels like I’ve been continuously revising it for a few weeks now, but this is a first “quick edit” as I wait for reader responses to come back and do a bigger revision) of Mercy (which I’m now thinking I’ll retitle as “Merciful”), I’ve been…

Drone on and on…

I’ve been wanting a “drone” for ages now.  I hesitate to call most of what we think of as drones “drones” because, in fact, they are rarely truly autonomous except for brief moments if they lose contact with their radio controller and lower themselves to the ground.  The average American consumer is not purchasing predators…

Money Changes Everything

This message brought to you by “Rogue Mission”, and the letters F, U, and the numbers 2012, and 42… ———————– We’ve keep going through these “historic” election cycles.  It seems since 1992 every election has been called “historic”.  Electing Clinton:  HISTORIC!   The Republicans taking over in 1996 with their Contract on America:  HISTORIC!!  The contentious…

A Bad Day is a Good Story

So it’s been a bit of an uneven week.  By uneven, I mean great heaping piles of it have blown chunks, the sort of steaming pile of excrement useful for fertilizing dead soil and making it deader. It started when I re-read the ending of the novel.  Ugh.  It really was a hot mess.  Better…