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Diving a bit deep into the weeds of the writer brain, I’m always thinking about…quotation marks. Because my way of using them is, for most Americans, incorrect. This drives my poor friend and editor, Jason Bennion, to distraction each and every time I send a manuscript his way. And I am always sympathetic, apologetic, and…unwilling to change. What’s the issue? The problem isn’t quotation marks in passages of dialogue; those I deploy correctly (or when I mess up, it’s a genuine typo). My problem comes when using quotation marks when denoting words or phrases specifically, at the end of a sentence.Down the rabbit hole….

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In: The Song of Forgotten Stars, Writing
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I have recently finally started to unravel the plot of Forgotten Stars V: The Final Frontier (not the actual title), much to my pleasure. This one has been giving me fits, to the point that I’ve been seriously considering making the shift from Pantser to Plotter. This is because the key turns out to have been…plotting. OK, an aside if you’re not familiar with the terms ‘pantser’ and ‘plotter’. Some writers plot everything out, writing extensive story outlines of varying degrees of complexity from writer to writer, in order to get the story shaped before they ever start drafting. The ideaDown the rabbit hole….

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In: The Chilling Killing Wind, The Song of Forgotten Stars, Writing
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“Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” –Sam Seaborn, “Twenty Hours In America (part two)”, THE WEST WING I don’t know if I’m a great writer, but if that’s one of the qualities they need I’m well on my way, because I steal left and right from my betters and I don’t feel the slightest ethical qualm in doing so. The latest? I’m swiping an event and repurposing it from one of my most foundational fantasy texts. No, I’m not going to spell it out, because it’s a spoiler, and I’m just setting up in BookDown the rabbit hole….

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To justify the Jimmy Buffet reference, here’s the cheeseburger I had the other night. And here I am, writing. Both of these things happened in Paradise. Some writers are insistent about doing their work in their preferred environments–their home offices or libraries–but I’ve always been able to write just about anywhere I can plunk down with my computer for a while. I actually like having a bit of hubbub around me, and when I write at home I don’t like it to be too quiet: I’ll almost always have music going, and nowadays there is the wonderful world of soundscape videosDown the rabbit hole….

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Since I rededicated this space as my primary home online and the center of my blogging universe, I haven’t discussed my writing progress much! But first, a diversion. Someone shared this painting on Twitter the other day, and I found it captivating. It’s called “Dickens’s Dream”, by Robert William Buss, and the conceit is simple: Charles Dickens is dozing in his chair, and the air around him is full of his dreams of all his characters. Note that the ones nearest him, the ones most present in his mind, are the ones in color, while others are uncolored, hazy, andDown the rabbit hole….

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So, here we are, four months since my last check in! And so much and so little has changed. The pandemic continues, and for a while it seemed as if things might be slowly getting better…and then, for a lot of reasons, they stopped getting better and started getting worse again. Anyhow…life goes on for me. I’m still writing and still reading, and I now have Book II of Seaflame! over 60,000 words, which is a roughly-projected one-quarter of the way done. This one is not progressing swiftly, and I’m pretty confident that after I’m done with this project, I’ll neverDown the rabbit hole….

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In: Seaflame!, The Song of Forgotten Stars, Writing

Greetings, programs! Last time I checked in I was gearing up to do a burst of edits for The Savior Worlds, as part of my effort to get it release-worthy for launch in May. Well. As I’m sure you’re all well aware, a month later…the world happened. The plan was to release at Buffalo’s Nickel City Con in May, but now, because of Covid-19, Nickel City Con isn’t happening this year. And that’s not the only hiccup in the works. My wonderful cover artist got her work done and we were just starting to talk about when we could meet upDown the rabbit hole….

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  Greetings, Programs! I haven’t posted in a couple weeks–sorry!–but the reasons, as ever, are good (I hope). Having received feedback on the manuscript of The Savior Worlds (The Song of Forgotten Stars, book 4) from several trusted voices, it’s time for another heavy dose of revision work before I send the thing out for proofreading in March. I’ve got kind of a hard deadline going here: I need to have this draft (Draft 3.0) ready to go by the end of this month. The ultimate goal is to release Book 4 at Nickel City Con in May, and that’s aDown the rabbit hole….

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  So last week I wrote about the various issues that arise when writing not just one novel but a series of novels, and wouldn’t you know it! I am running up against those issues right now. In just a couple of weeks I start doing my next round of revisions for The Savior Worlds (The Song of Forgotten Stars, book 4), which is the volume in the series that kicks the larger story into real motion. That being the case, it’s suddenly clear to me that I need to really codify, if only for my own use right now, the backstoryDown the rabbit hole….

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Greetings, Programs! The other day, the ever-fantastic Briana Mae Morgan asked on Twitter:   I am simultaneously excited and nervous to be writing a series. It’s my first series! How do y’all do this? — briana morgan PREORDER LIVINGSTON GIRLS! (@brimorganbooks) January 5, 2020 Naturally, I responded, because I have committed or am in the process of committing several crimes of Serial Fiction, and now I’m going to extend my thoughts a bit as to how to write a series. I tend to think of storytelling, at its most basic, in terms of structure, so naturally my thoughts on writingDown the rabbit hole….