• Sometimes you kick yourself

    I have this book that’s been poking at me for a long time. It’s not anything to do with anything else. I read a bit of it at Miscon a couple years back and folks there have been asking for…

  • Some word meanings in Path of Fate

    I dug this up recently. It’s my worksheet for names in the Path books. You’ll notice that Kebonsat’s name was originally Nomaksat. My editor didn’t care for that name and so I came up with something more workable. Kegonsat doesn’t…

  • The wild book in progress

    This is from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. It’s my go-to book when writing becomes thorny. Here’s where I’m at now. She says it so well.   I do not so much write a book as sit up with it,…

  • The day that got lost

    This morning I started out a little late as school was canceled again (but not tomorrow!) and did some laundry, fed the children, and then got a call from the GI doc for the boy. They could see him today…

  • Beginning freezing

    I posted that little bit  the other day of a story I wanted to work on. And then I promptly froze. It was so easy and so fun to write, and then I froze. I know a bit about the…

  • Bread dough theory of writing

    I’ve often thought that some stories are made like bread dough, one made with a starter. First you stir in the ingredients to make the starter and feed it for awhile and let it bubble and ferment. Then eventually it’s…

  • Jiggety Jig

    We made the trip to Oregon and back in four days, plus unloaded the cargo trailer and did the Jayfest signing at Powells. Whew. I’m a little tired and yet have to get right back to work. The good news…

  • Recovery

    As I mentioned, yesterday I finished my proposal chapters. Late last night, I finished polishing them up to send to my agent. Part of that polishing revolved around consistency. I had changed some name spellings and some capitalizations, and I…

  • writer neuroses

    Actually, this comes under the topic of neuroses, but I’m only covering one here. The fear of running out of ideas. That includes general plot ideas as well as world ideas, characters, and even clothing and food ideas. I live…

  • What is True

    I’m linking this to Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It’s brilliant. It’s inspiring. And as I’m working on this revision, it reminds me what the writing is and should be about. Today, I…