point of view

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POINT OF VIEW: When Reviews Attack

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head in hands - deposit photos

I just got the worst review of my writing life. I mean, truly brutal. They pretty much hated everything about the story. Technically, it was written four years ago, but I just ran across it this last week. It’s for one of my earlier stories, but it absolutely pulls no punches – the characters sketchy and poorly drawn, the story unbelievable, and – gasp – the world-building too sparse. It also called my writing that most dreaded of adjectives, the one every writer hates to hear. Unoriginal. I bring this up not to cast aspersions on the reviewer. They felt … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Rewriting the Past

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I’ve been in the process of re-releasing a number of my older works. It’s funny to think I’ve been published long enough to actually have some older works. LOL… In the process, I’ve had a chance to see how my writing has changed over the years. Most recently, I updated “The Homecoming,” coming out this Wednesday in eBook and (for the first time) paperback! The story itself held up remarkably well – I even had a few of those “damn, I actually wrote this?” moments, which is always nice for an author. *grin* But there were a few things I … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Here We Go

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rocket - pixabay

So things are a ‘changin for me. I have finally completed the two trilogies I’ve been working on for the last two years (well, four years for Oberon) and I am looking ahead to what’s next. I have decided to take my shot at the bigtime. I have discussed this with my current publishers – the wonderful folks at both Mischief Corner Books and Dreamspinner Publications – and I am going to try to get an agent for my next book. My ultimate goal is to break into one of the big publishing houses to see where it might take … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: The World Needs to Calm the F* Down.

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crazy - pixabay

Pride Season is upon us, and with it, so many things I have to do, and so little time to do them. We have two readings in Sacramento this week (thank you Jeff Adams for managing one of them!), two pride celebrations, an author lunch, and that’s just the stuff on my local author group plate. The world outside our doorstep seems to be spinning out of control, my writing is on hold until I can find time for it, and somehow I have about ten times as many things to do as I have time to do them. So … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Pride

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Scott 1992

We’re entering pride season, a time we celebrate our community – one that I have watched grow from “gay” to “gay and lesbian” to “GLBT” to “LGBT” to “LGBTIQA,” all over the course of my lifetime. I’m fifty-one this year, and as I look around, I am amazed at the number of pride celebrationsheld around the country. Almost every city has one, and Pride has become a commodity, a shiny rainbow-colored thing that in the process has lost some of its former meaning. This is part of the mainstreaming of queer culture that has had enormous benefits for our community, … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Gardening is Writing

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We writers are creative folk. Beyond writing, it’s not uncommon for us to have other creative pursuits – art, music, theater… or even gardening. I started vegetable gardening when I was in Junior High. Two of my friends went to the store with me, and we got seeds and soil and planted a garden in the side yard. I’d never really experienced some of the things we grew fresh. This was in the late seventies and early eighties, and much of what we ate at home came out of tin cans. The first time I had some fresh-cooked green beans … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Immersion

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immersion - pixabay

Last week I talked about the day-to-day distractions that take us out of or away from our writing time. Today I want to talk about immersion. Mark and I have been studying the Italian language for eleven years. It’s something I really enjoy, and something Mark and I do together a few times a week. Italian has become our own “secret” language, our way to communicate with each other when we don’t want the people around us to know what we’re saying. Of course, that only works if they’re not Italians. 😛 But as good as we’ve become at conjugation, … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Is hard.

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penny - pixabay

Have you ever seen the movie Somewhere in Time? It featured Superman’s Christopher Reeve in a heartbreaking time traveler’s tale that revolved around a single penny. Reeve’s character found a way to go back in time by surrounding himself entirely with objects from the past and willing himself back to their period. His undoing? A single modern penny, forgotten in his pants pocket, that ultimately shatters the illusion and sends him back to his own time. Writing is like that, especially writing stories of the past or the future. We all know the present well enough, but throw one bad … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: When Life Throws You a Curve Ball

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curve ball - pixabay

I am not where I thought I’d be today. One of my family members had a health issue requiring sudden relocation from Sacramento to Tucson, Arizona, throwing my normal ordered schedule into chaos. I’m not officially OCD, but I do love to have things proceed according to schedule. It’s how I keep so many balls in the air at once – relationship, work, writing, and occasionally sleeping and eating. But a trip like this throws all that out the window. And who knew how difficult it could be to find good wifi in this day and age? Still, these are … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Small Joys

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Being a writer is a lonely profession. Most of your time is spent in front of your computer, alone, trying to spin words into worlds and fighting off those dreaded twin feelings of fraud and failure. So when something good happens, even if it’s just a “small joy,” you learn to embrace it and use it to feed your writing soul. Yesterday, my short story “Chinatown” came back from the first magazine I had submitted it to. It was rejected, but accompanied by a very nice note saying that the editor hoped it would find a home elsewhere. So I … Read more