writer at play
In January I read:
A Reason for God (Timothy Keller)
Physik (Angie Sage)
Queste (Angie Sage)
The Mysterious Benedict Society & the Perilous Journey (Trenton Lee Stewart)
Your Child’s Growing Mind (Jane Healy)
Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world (Mark Kurlansky)
Mister Monday (Garth Nix)
Grim Tuesday (Garth Nix)
Hmm, I think I know why I didn’t get [...]
Posted in kai, season of rains, short stories on Jan 28th, 2009
Got over 3K words on the new book. Can I just say that the romance in this story is going to be SO much fun to write?
I still get a warm fuzzy contented feeling when I think back on Saturday. D. took the older kids and went out the entire morning and early afternoon. Left [...]
Posted in linktopia, writing process on Jan 25th, 2009
I’m going to try something new here on this blog. Once a week or so (I refuse to commit myself to just “once a week” because we all know what the road to hell is paved with), I’m going to put up a bunch of links to posts that amuse, delight, annoy, or make me [...]
Posted in challenges, reading on Jan 23rd, 2009
I’m a planner. I love lists, schedules, menus. I love having goals to tick off and challenges to complete.
In fact, the more, the better!
Since this is a new year and all, I signed up for a reading challenge: 52 books in 52 weeks. I started strong with a theology book (Tim Keller’s The Reason for [...]
Posted in personal, writing process on Jan 22nd, 2009
My writing buddy Jo has a post up about the first time she realized that she wanted to write stories. It got me thinking about my own first writing efforts and the meandering journey I took before I got serious about writing.
I don’t know when I decided that I wanted to be a writer. It [...]
Posted in challenges, creativity, writing process on Jan 21st, 2009
A week ago, I wrote about all the time I’ve spent not writing. Today I want to talk about another limited resource: the mental space in which my stories dwell, quietly gestating, until they’re ready to be written. I call this (quite cleverly) headspace.
All my stories need simmering, but there are only so many mental [...]
Posted in inspiration, news, self-promotion, short stories on Jan 16th, 2009
Soulsong, featuring the bard Elinor, is now up at Mindflights! Read it here.
This is my second published Elinor story (here’s a link to the first one, for those interested). Elinor and I go back a long way. In her first incarnation, she was my twin-sword-wielding, monster-bashing bard in the Hellfire expansion of Diablo. Diablo was [...]
Posted in inspiration, kai, random, writing process on Jan 14th, 2009
The economy must not be doing so great. I didn’t get a single free calendar in the mail at the end of last year. Not from my alma mater. Nothing from our insurance agent. No calendar love at all.
Since I can’t function without a calendar (I’ve been scheduling everything in my head and if you’ve [...]
A concerned email last night from a writing buddy alerted me to the fact that, gosh, I haven’t been online much.
That’s because I’ve been good about keeping my New Year’s resolution and spending less time on the Internet.
So, I’ve been doing other stuff. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing.
I have been: [...]
Posted in news, self-promotion, short stories on Jan 6th, 2009
Neverlands and Otherwheres is out!
A note about my story Second Sight: This is the most autobiographical of all my stories. The Skeleton Man and Kaloo Baba are bogeys from my childhood (my little bro and cousin might recognize the latter!), and I actually lived next door to the Unpainted House. As for the rest, well, [...]