I’d start off by saying what a quiet month January was… if I wasn’t secretly convinced that January was far less than a month this year. I’m reasonably certain that it was roughly 1-2 weeks long, and if someone told me it had actually only lasted a handful of hours, I’m not sure I’d be…
“In a field / I am the absence / of field. This is / always the case. Wherever I am / I am what is missing.” – Mark Strand, “Keeping Things Whole” In art, there’s a concept called negative space. Negative space is the space that exists around the subject. If your artwork…
With Thanksgiving behind us, it can only mean one thing: weeks and weeks of eating all varieties of pie. Lovely, wonderful, oh-so-tasty pie.
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” -Samuel Beckett After a month in which I wrote almost nothing, I thought it would be appropriate to focus this blog post on the value of writing less. By that, I don’t mean writing breaks. I mean giving your words, your characters, and your…
“The best laid plans of mice and men rarely survive first contact with the enemy.” I was actually going to start this post a couple days ago, but saw that it was almost the end of August and that I had an opportunity to instead post it at the absolute last possible moment, along with…
See These Bones Status: “Done” (136,344 words) After somewhere between seven and nine months of writing, I finished the first draft of See These Bones last night. I then imported the manuscript into Calibre, converted it to mobi format, dropped it on my Kindle, posted a quick Facebook status update to crow about being…
See These Bones Status: 109k words / ~130k projected length “May you live in interesting times… and may your day job’s workload increase just in time to interfere with your writing and publishing efforts.” With only four days left in the month, this very nearly became the July writing update… but enough has happened…
See These Bones Status: 87k words / ~130k projected length This update is coming in a little bit later than expected, mainly because the first of those two numbers up there was supposed to be a lot bigger than it is. In fact, it was supposed to be somewhere in the range of…
See These Bones Status: 79k words / ~130k projected length This week’s update will be a little shorter than usual, as it’s Sunday afternoon, the NBA playoffs are happening, and I spent the majority of my weekend working on the book itself. As the word count update suggests, progress continues, if slower than hoped…
All is going well on the writing front, and I’ll be adding a new status post towards the tail end of next week. However, as I’ve also started another editing pass on The Many Travails of John Smith, I wanted to take a moment today to write about a literary device I regret employing with…