Day 5

You ever set out to do something insane, and realize half-way through exactly how insane it is? I couldn't post last night because I didn't want to touch another key. I have a Yeti microphone and Dragon set up on my laptop... I may see what I can do with that today. About a year …

Days 3 and 4

Where'd 3 Go?? As anyone who knows me will tell you; if the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, I'm foreman of Satan's Public Works crew. I had a set back yesterday morning when I woke up panicking about money. So, I took one of the short-stories I'd written and just needed to …

Day 2

Ok, I was setting out to expand the outline today. I didn’t do so well. Even keeping the expansion scant, I got too much into writing the story and made the outline of each chapter way too big. Dialogue would jump into my head and come out my fingers. My usual chapter is about 1,600 …

Day 1

It's the end of day 1, and I'm wiped out. My brain is jelly. As for using the software, I ditched that idea around six hours ago. It is sooooooo detailed that there's no way I could finish in two days. It will be great when I'm trying to suss out characters and stories in …

Book in 12 Days

Ok, I sat at the beach and wrote all this in my notebook yesterday, was going to type it up when I got home, and post it. Unfortunately, I finally talked my roommate into watching Stranger Things and we ended up binge watching six episodes. No more work was done. So, here's what should have …

Tooling around and saw this post about self publishing…

It's from 2012, which is ANCIENT in the blogging (and especially in the self-publishing) world. But everything in it is so spot on, still. Don't self-publish your book because nobody else would touch it - self-publish because you love writing, you've put in the work to make the best product you can, because you love …

I cannot and will not live in a world without contractions – It ain’t normal

Technical and academic writing are banes to creative writing for a few reasons. Today, I'd like to talk about contractions. Bottom line - unless you are Queen Elizabeth II or Data, they are a part of everyone's speech and should be a part of your writing. The absence of contractions in dialogue and first-person POV …

He began to write a blog post

I hate platitudes - like, really hate platitudes. There was one that I didn't mind until I saw it hanging over the desk of a boss I couldn't stand. I hope she got a nasty paper cut when she hung it up. Do or do not. There is no try. -- Yoda Now I can't …

Being a Writer With ADHD

For years, I had a nameless problem. Okay, that's partially true. I had a lot of names for it - none of them polite and most aimed at myself. When I could force myself to sit down and write, I was fine -- for five to fifteen minutes. Somewhere in that time, my fingers would …

Where Have All The Rules Gone?

The Let's Play Ball Blog

Remember the good old days when strict gatekeepers had total control over what got published? It wasn’t all that long ago, when you think about it. Some of us still have scars from trying to crash those gates. Getting slapped down by relentless rejection was bad enough, but what about all the rules that these guardians of literature enforced? If we were fortunate enough to get replies from them at all, we’d receive a dressing down about all the strictures we had violated in our pitiful attempts to write. We would not merit a second glance, much less true consideration, until we mastered the various commandments they had set up to keep the barriers in place.

There were various telltale signs, the gatekeepers said, that pegged you as an amateur. One of these was overuse of adjectives and adverbs. Well, maybe the occasional odd adjective could be allowed, they conceded…

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