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Novel Pause
Dear readers, thanks for putting up with my weird ways! It’s always a pleasant surprise to hear I made you laugh, or cringe, or display whatever other emotion strong enough to have you hit the contact button. Please do keep up your reading while I take a break from writing. Less suffering inflicted on the…
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Rejection, yippee!
Anyone else out there breathing a sigh of relief when a standard submission response hits the inbox? It’s so good to get a rejection. No more need to steady yourself for the kind of comprehensively critical appraisal beta-readers tend to provide. You look better without that fake frozen grin, and you know it. Bye bye…
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Chapters are for sissies
Having declared “Guilty until proven”, my dime novel number five, sufficiently rewritten and done, I retrospectively wonder about the structure. One more LinkedIn forum discussion got me started. Lots of real, proper, professional writers are exchanging extremely well founded views on chapter lengths. One is supposed to consider an improbable number of variables defining the…
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Rewrite to make Technovelgy?
Familiar with Technovelgy? I only just discovered this wonderful place, where you meet innumerable SciFi books and authors through the devices they introduced. Would love to make that list. Why not? One of the triggers that made me write Plugger stuff was my dissatisfaction with the lack of plausible space travel scenarios disgracing the bulk…
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Why is it fun to write?
Seriously asking here, because: There’s no money in fiction writing. For most of us. And we’re perfectly aware of this fact. There’s some kind of work involved, judging by how the head tends to run hot in a flow. Writing is all over our schedule, crowding out activities considered relevant by less weird people. Our default…
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Meet the nice guys: Exilian
Tradition demands to start the New Year withs some fancy vows. “Resume going to the gym”. Or “replace the kitchen faucet” . That kind of thing. Familiar with the exercise? Aware of the futility? Thought you would be. Probably a shared trait, among sapients, across solar systems. Three weekly runs at the gym are fun.…
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Writer’s amnesia
Today, it happened again. This is scary. First time I was subjected to the phenomenon, my inner hypochondriac suspected early stage Alzheimer. He insisted on doing the usual tests. Results just fine. So what the hell is this? The admin alerts me to a new comment on Inside the box. Vaguely remember the plot. Wonder how long…
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Obsession
One more question for the experts on LinkedIn: How bad a sign is it, if you get obsessed with your characters? This is very much like real life falling in love, only worse. In real life, past a certain age, you’re familiar with the phenomenon, and know the acute phase won’t last. Either the subject…
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Last stretch urge
Spent months loving, nurturing, developing, refining and generally never getting enough of my cast. Reach chapter 9 out of 10 and wham, change of mindset. I just want to get it over with. AFAP. Judging by what happened with the Pluggers, the last stretch of Think-o-mat will again consist of a fortnight of tedium. Writing fast and…
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Inside the box
“It’s no worse than an office or a cubicle, Elisa. Will you stop making a fuzz? People were upset, when the first open space workplaces appeared, you know? Saw a documentary about this. One day the workers had each their own office. The next they were assigned cubicles, in a large common room. They suddenly…