Category: Uncategorized
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Washington DC reading! April 23 2017
If you’re in the DC/MD/VA area, come to my Sunday April 23 book talk and reading at Soapstone Market in northwest DC! It’s a benefit for the local DC news site ForestHillsConnection.com – and the venue has fine coffee and good beer. Here’s the flyer –
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My hybrid-genre column
Fiction-writing site The Fictorians features my column on writing a hybrid-genre novel! Come read both about the personal inspiration behind The Demon in Business Class – and what I learned while trying to turn a vague sense of a changing world into a engaging novel! Hybrid Genres at Fictorians.com
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Giving to, not just dealing with
Sometimes leaving is a process. I’m off to Hartford’s Connecticon this weekend to work my publisher’s table and learn direct sales by doing. Which means I should have spent the week blogging reflections on the industry and marketing and such. Instead I did a lot of weeding and yard work, which was twice as hard…
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Pandoc makes for easy document conversion
NaNoWriMo 2015, Day 01 — by the site’s count, 1966 words, seventy more than my goal. It went smoothly, without many breaks. When I was within 300 words of the goal I was more interested in using them to flesh out what I had already written than to push forward. This kind of internal editing…
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The Scientists & The Spy, Chapter 6
This week, government gal Dorothy’s bus ride introduces her to a charming diplomat-in-exile! If you need to catch up on the novel, there’s a main page with all chapters plus historical material. Thanks for reading!
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On technology in fiction
Modern and future readers don’t need to be convinced that technology will improve to magical levels; we’ve seen it happen in our lifetimes, in our children’s. To explain more than absolutely needed is to write for the past, but the dead will not read us. So I have become pointedly effacing on the subject of…
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Making a busy life into a busy blog
The blog has been stale although I have been busy. In posts across the web, that “although” is a “because” — you know you’ve read it, here and a thousand other blogs. Which is a problem. It’s one thing to know silent business is a missed opportunity to self-promote, another to make it an aspect…
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On scaring people with writing
The Atlantic notes with alarm the bizarre saga of Patrick McLaw, a writer and teacher put under medical evaluation seemingly for the violent story lines of his self-published novels, to media reports wholly absent of reminders of the right of free speech. Although subsequent reports hint, weirdly, at greater issues, Ken White nicely states the concern that not only do…
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Russia, a cautionary tale
A short note, for those who read my last post: I made my goal, reducing my novel 10.2% down to 124,400 words. Not merely a slimming — at least ten passages, or one every 15,000 words, needed a complete rewrite just to make sense, and in some cases had to grow. It was a grueling…
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The Autumn 2013 Plan
Speaking strictly commercially, I did everything wrong with my writing. I don’t have an identifiable genre or sub-genre. It’s a literary noir-styled fantasy thriller romance and an allegory about globalization and growing up. There’s no shelf for that. Crossing genres and styles is gaining popularity, but it’s still a hard sell to make cold. Perhaps…