It's that wonderful time of year again when millions of Americans wash their hands, put on their masks, and sit down at their computers to shop during work hours. And while there are many deals to take advantage of today, none are as earth-shattering, bang-for-your-buck, undeniable ROI, shatter your worldview, or mutually beneficial as a purchase of one or many of the Vinestead Anthology books...
Numbers don't lie. I lie. I lie a lot. But generally speaking, you can always count on numbers to tell you the truth. And when you're working on the zero draft of a new novel, those numbers can tell you how far you've come and how far you still need to go. More than that, there are statistics I just made up that say: if you pass this point, you are likely to finish this novel. As someone who...
It has been a month since I finished reading Providence by Max Barry, and I still can't stop thinking about it. On the surface, it's a relatively simple story that will take you back to the good ol' days of Ender's Game and Starship Troopers, but it also throws in so many modern writing tricks that it feels like something completely new. The story moves fast, skipping past the extraneous to get...
If it hadn’t been for the bright green signs calling out the exits for the city of Holliday, Trace Butler might have driven right past what appeared to her as an endless black prairie with hardly enough evercrete and glass to reflect the bright moon hanging overhead. Driving west out of Wichita Falls had been like watching the brightness go out on a display, until the only lights left were those...
NaNoWriMo is coming up soon, which means a new crop of writers will be looking for the right software to help write their 50,000-word opus. Enter Novlr, a web-based writing platform that is simple, clean, and eager to motivate you to reach your goal. If you're doing NaNoWriMo for the first time, Novlr is a great choice. But what about the rest of us? What about the seasoned amateurs who haven't...
Nobody hung out in the break room of the tech shop on Level 3, mostly because it smelled like plastic. More accurately, it smelled like plastic after it had passed through the digestive system of an orange fungus for which the Biology books had no name but the other works had taken to calling the Stuff. The Stuff loved the break room because that’s where all the old equipment was stashed—routers...
Because there's always a WIP. People like you and I, we live for the WIP. We die for the WIP. Without the WIP, there would be no reason to get up in the morning, or eat nachos, or own a computer. At least, that has been my experience. I'm well aware there are people for whom writing is not a compulsion. They wake and sleep every day without the slightest inclination to write a story. While that...
Bippity boppity, hippity hoppity.
At first, Clyde thought it was just the weather, something about the barometric pressure dropping as a storm slid down over the mountains. The gray clouds brought only a fine mist, but they blanketed the land, cutting visibility down to almost nothing. Clyde was on the south edge of the ranch when his fingers began to tingle in his leather gloves. He’d been working on a section of fencing that...
Here's a thing: I've never written a novel from a single character's point of view. It has been twenty years, and despite my best efforts, I've never made it more than a half baker's dozen chapters into a project. It's not that I don't have ideas; obviously I have stories to fill novels. So it must be something else, some part of the writing that is just so difficult and enigmatic that at some...
I'm a Science Fiction author, so I mostly post about my experiences with writing, publishing, marketing, and self-loathing.
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