writing

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POINT OF VIEW: 2021 Is Here – What Now?

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2021

Last week, I talked about some writing successes during an otherwise bleak 2020. Today I’m turning my gaze ahead and pulling out my crystal ball (and my planner). Here are some things I am hoping for and preparing for in 2021. In January (1/10), I am rereleasing Between the Lines, my River City Chronicles prequel. I have re-edited and extended it a bit, and it will be available in print as a novella for the first time. It also has a spiffy new cover, which I am previewing in this week’s newsletter! In February (2/10), I’ll be rereleasing a short … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Breaking Through the Wall

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breaking the wall

Sometimes we just get stuck. Writers gotta write, but life has a habit of getting in the way. Maybe a particular project has you stumped. Or maybe it’s a general sense of malaise or a bad review, or a book that didn’t sell like you hoped it would. As I write this, we’re at the tail end of 2020, a year that offered enough pain and distraction to stop the most dedicated of writers dead in their tracks. Whatever it is, you need a way to break through the wall. If you’ve never read it, I’d like to recommend a … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing in the Margins

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writing margins - deposit photos

Growing up, I was an insatiable reader. Starting with the Lord of the Rings in third grade, I moved through the canons of Asimov, Clarke, Silverberg, McCaffrey, Heinlein and many more by the time I hit junior high. It wasn’t until I was in eighth grade and realized I had crushes on other boys in my class that I noticed the lack of diversity in speculative fiction. And it wasn’t until much later – after I came out at twenty-three – that I started thinking about actually writing my own queer characters. My very first one was a gay, winged … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Following the Plan

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plan - pixabay

Last January, I announced that I had a plan. Going all in on my agent search. Writing every morning from 5:30 to 7:00, to maximize my writer productivity. And putting together another novel. So here we are, almost at the end of 2020, and I figured it was time to look back and reassess. In March, COVID-19 took us by storm, and nothing has been the same since. But I stuck to my plan, through the lockdown and everything that followed. I submitted Dropnauts to more than 140 agents, and so far I’ve had two full manuscript requests to show … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Navigating the Interregnums

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pause - pixabay

interregnum /ˌin(t)ərˈreɡnəm/ noun1) a period when normal government is suspended, especially between successive reigns or regimes.2) an interval or pause between two periods of office or other things. The world is holding its breath. As I sit here writing this, I find myself living through a number of nested interregnums. We’re still in the throes of the Great Pause, as the world tries to figure out how to live with, and ultimately get to living without, Covid-19. Here in the US, we’re in the interregnum between administrations, holding our breath and waiting for the madness of King Trump to come … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Short

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Yellow pencil - Deposit Photos

For most of my life I considered myself a novel writer. Novels were my preferred reading length – I love getting lost in an epic story with lots of room to explore. Give me five-hundred pages, a thousand even, and let me roam in your world. And if it’s an epic series of 10+ books? I am so there, with reading glasses on. So it’s curious that I find myself writing lots of shorts these days too. Don’t get me wrong. I still LOVE novels (reading and writing them), and have two in progress with a third soon to be … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Hope

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forest path - hope - pixabay

As a sci-fi author, I have written a number of times before about our responsibility to forecast the future, both to warn the world about what might be coming, and to share my hopes for what we might become. In these last few years, I have written four separate columns about the idea of hope and writing. In these fraught several weeks before the US election, I find myself hoping against hope for change, and then fearing the worst. Every day, there’s a new poll that reinforces that hope, and a new piece of news that dashes it. Biden’s up … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: The Mutable Future

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crystal ball - pixabay

I just finished a new short story called “High Seven,” which takes place 150 years from now in a future where the world has devolved into a series of city-states that are holding on as best they can against the ravages of climate change. My view of the future has dimmed markedly over the last twenty years, and even more so over the last four. It’s hard now to see a future that’s not defined by climate change, one way or another. I still have hope, and my stories reflect that, but it’s a hope that somehow we’ll manage to … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: (Re)Defining Success

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checklist - pixabay

I’m in the middle of Pitch Wars, an annual contest to find a mentor who will then help you prep your manuscript for an agent submission showcase next spring. This is my second year participating in this amazing and terrifying event. Last year, I went into it blind, fully expecting to snag a mentor, and having no idea how many thousands of writers were doing the same thing at the same time. My four mentors received our pitches, and I waited, hopeful that I would receive a response, or maybe even more than one. A day passed, then two and … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Is My Escape From Pandemic World

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space portal - deposit photos

As I write this, I am sitting in the parking lot at the grocery store waiting for our weekly grocery curbside pick-up. It struck me, driving over here, how small my world has become since the pandemic began. Once a week I leave home to go to the post office, then to the grocery store, and then back home again. Every four weeks, I plug in the Prius to charge up for the next month. I’ve been doing this now for more than six months, and only on a couple occasions have I gone farther than this two-mile radius from … Read more