Tag: fiction
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Books at AwesomeCon need flair
AwesomeCon‘s sales and promotional floor is so big that guides and maps never refer to it as a unit bound by walls, only to its subsections. All of it is dense with visual stimulus and novelty. Vendors sell comics, books, movies, posters, toys, models, clothing and accessories, even niche products like leather bondage wear or rings…
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Writer vs author (social media)
This is a post about web marketing and how I am working through mine. TL;DR – avoid mistaking writer for author, mistaking content for news.
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Merge and purge (writing and language)
My first draft was 220,000 words of symbol-laden passages and over-described locales. Over years I steadily replaced sets of words with smaller stronger ones, refining the language to heighten the story and the emotional viewpoint. The never-quite-articulated goal was for the words to hold more weight relative to their size thanks to their structure. In…
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Big news – and some thanks
I am thrilled to announce I have signed a contract with WordFire Press to publish The Demon in Business Class, my first novel! I am so excited about this! But it’s some months away, with a lot to do between now and then. I’ll talk about it much more as the book launch approaches, and I…
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Robots vs. androids in fiction (go robots!)
Among the characters in my new novel is a collective of former package-delivery drones that, after a war, evolved themselves into a taxi service for their damaged city. From the earliest drafts, I saw them as small flying saucers, with only a central trunk/harness to carry goods or a seated cross-legged person. It took a little…
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NaNoWriMo update at the halfway mark (yay)
I keep meaning to blog! And it isn’t that I am SO BUSY – NaNoWriMo has become so all encompassing that all my draft blogs are navel-gazing treatises on processes which inform the start of my day but go by the wayside when it’s ten pm and I still have seven hundred words to go.…
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My return to writing, via NaNoWriMo
I have long been absent from public life and social media. In July I had severe medical problems – short-lived, thankfully, but requiring rest. In some way, the medical problems deflated me. My mood, always a little low to begin with, got lower still. I could manage family obligations, and family joys, but I was…
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The cyborg in a time of prolonged war
A friend recently told me that the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, about a grievously-wounded astronaut fitted with human-looking but superpowered prosthetics, was being rebooted. I vented about this a while — I have issues with the constant readaptation of the recent pop-culture past, driven by the marketer’s fear of an unsure…
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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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The new novel
On November 18th of alternate years, Mr Earbrass begins writing ‘his new novel’. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might…