Blog Library

Here are all my posts in date order.

Dancing Jack now Available (May 2, 2023)
That Amazing Feeling (May 2, 2023)
The Watcher’s Mask now Available (May 2, 2023)
The Development of Plot Development (May 5, 2023)
Researching the Fantastic: On knowing enough to pretend (May 7, 2023)
The Machinery of Writing: First Drafts, Technology, and Doing What Works (May 15, 2023)
Characterization: On being nobody, seeking faces, tragic flaws, and a giant phallus (May 23, 2023)
Fleet Time: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws! (May 30, 2023)
Writing Sickness She and I are floundering together in the middle of the book, which always is a Slough of Despond. As usual, it feels like we’ll be stuck here forever. (June 9, 2023)
Let It Be: Solving One Damned Problem After Another I’ll hand off the problem to the dark part of my brain, and try not to think about it at all. (June 18, 2023)
Inventing A Dialect We can make the language strange by various means… But if we make the language too weird, it will be too difficult to read. (June 27, 2023)
Courage from the Outside In In the dream, I was making love to a woman, and at a crucial point my anatomy changed and I became a man. (A few months later, I dreamed that I lost my husband on the train and Deb took his seat. Needless to say, I soon divorced.) (July 6, 2023)
A Little Rain Must Fall. Record-setting rain and a leaky roof, among other things. (July 25, 2023)
The Fun Part. I’m a terrible writer, and this is a terrible book! It is so trite, so predictable, so awful, dreary, and poorly written, blah, blah, blah. (September 20, 2023)
Reading the Niuspepa With Rosemary. Perhaps “very much” would do the job: “You very much do that close to now.” It is convoluted and mildly alien, and I think the intended meaning comes through. (September 25, 2023)
My Words Are Rocks. But my words are rocks. I build with them, but they are rocks. Tiffany windows they are not. (October 5, 2023)
How to Write a Page. Writing is thinking, and writing while thinking about writing…well, it certainly could be a knotty mess, but for me it sometimes yields insight. (October 10, 2023)
Writing Backwards. Also, information dumps, Spot the rescue cow, and continually learning to write. (October 16, 2023)
Life in Books: The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan. The Gray House uses no tropes at all and explains very little, therefore even an experienced fantasy reader like myself is forced to rely on her wits. (October 25, 2023)
Patchwork and Writing the Wrong Book. This behind-the-scenes contention and discussion disappears by the final draft—thank you, delete button–so that you, dear reader, never suspect how confused I have been by my own project. (November 7, 2023)
Out of Book Limbo and Into the Fire. Flailing and grimly persisting, whooshing downhill on a bicycle, and a painting by Carl Spitzweg. (November 14, 2023)
Unintended Consequences. I was a smart, hard-working person who had always assumed this life would be mine to live, and it would be possible to write my way into success. But my life was now controlled by circumstance, not by me. (December 23, 2023)
Light Scatter. When I type up a chapter, comprehension becomes possible. The light-scatter coalesces into a focused beam, and I can see my book’s multitude of flaws and failures. And that’s okay: Imperfections are rocks that form a path across a river. I step on them, thank them, and leave them behind. (January 24, 2023)
Writing While SAD. I was a sad person, composing a first-person narrative that was fictionally composed by a sad fictional person. I didn’t have to look far to know what sadness feels like, but to express that feeling–while feeling it–wasn’t easy. Here are some strategies I used. (January 23, 2024)