There’s an interesting article over on Wired about Hollywood’s inability to get science right in the movies. It got me thinking about how hard I try to keep the science believable in my stories, and who I’m really doing that for.
The project I’m working on now, Ghost Ronin, has been tumbling around in my brain [...]
So I’m less than a page into Ghost Ronin and I’m getting all sorts of ideas. Good ideas, mostly, stuff I definitely want to do. Most of these ideas are about how I can shore up the gaps in my own knowledge and experience to make this story rock.
That’s one of my favorite things about [...]
Okay, the ball is rolling. I’ve started writing a novel, Ghost Ronin. Longtime readers have seen other iterations of this story as In Shining Armor.
Why am I revisiting this? Several reasons, really.
The first is comfort level. I’ve been picking at this story for 20 years. I still feel a strong connection to the story and [...]
Harlan Ellison is famous for a bit of performance art (among other things). He sits in a bookstore and writes a short story, store employees taping each page up in the window as he writes them. He has no chance to revise, and the audience gets to see the story as it happens, so to [...]
Since “Coffee and waffles”, I’ve written precisely nothing. I keep thinking about it. I keep meaning to. But faced with the choice between writing and napping, I become narcoleptic. Or reading a novel becomes the most important thing in the world. Or, god help me, I hard reset my phone just to reinstall all my [...]
Because the best ideas come to me in the shower, of course. This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I had a mini-epiphany about Revelation.
After my writing session two nights ago at Village Inn, I’d noticed a few things shaping up in this retelling. Daniel seems both more capable and a little more [...]
1,200 words on Revelation tonight. I attribute this to two things.
1. Coffee and waffles. I work swings, so when I get off work at 10pm, I have the option of either going straight home or stopping for a little smackrel of something on the way home. As it happens, there’s a Village Inn near my [...]
Regular readers know I’m both fiercely commited and fickle at the same time. In the moment, what I’m working on is the most important thing in the world, but when the moment passes, I’m easily pulled in random directions. This bizarre combination of focus and indecision has served me well as a pundit and columnist, [...]
I blame SE Hinton.
When I was in seventh grade, we read The Outsiders in class and then went on a field trip to see a screening of the movie. The story is a classic, at least for me–and it was a first novel–and one of the reasons is a literary trick Hinton used. At the end [...]
One of the key differences between the original draft of Revelation, back in 1996, and the current one shouldn’t be a difference at all. In 1996 I was out-processing from the Air Force, going from appointment to appointment and scribbling in my planner in between. I wrote anywhere and anywhen I could, sometimes for pages, [...]