Category
December 4, 2016
So comes to an end the two weeks of my daily blogging experiment. Time to examine the results. First of all, the critical question: will I continue blogging daily? No. The one risk I was most worried about is that it would get in the way of my fiction writing, and while that didn’t happen as much as I feared, it did happen more than I find acceptable. Were I like John Scalzi, a full-time writer of one type or another (mostly fiction now, though...
December 3, 2016
There’s a trait I share with my mother and older brother. It’s one I’ve long known about, though it’s been thrown in stark relief as of late. Here’s the story of how I first learned of its existence: When I was in high school, I wanted to put a CD player in my car. (Showing my age.) I mentioned this to my dad, and he said to wait and that we’d work on it soon. I was usually a respectful enough teenager, as far...
December 2, 2016
I was talking with my roomie earlier, and we were discussing work. This is a frequent topic, since I work too damn much. While we were talking, he mentioned a recent week where he worked 25 hours, and said how nice it was. He said it was about perfect, since he got all his work done and still had time to relax. I corrected his math. He probably did 25 hours of paid work, but add in chores, errands, commute, exercise, and everything else that needs...
December 1, 2016
I’ve learned a lot about naming over my time as a storyteller. Here’s the biggest tip: don’t name anything until you absolutely need to, use placeholders instead, and when you give characters/chapters/books their placeholders, make sure they’re flexible. It causes trouble down the line otherwise. I’ll give you some examples. The biggest one is that my upcoming book is not Book 3 as far as my notes are concerned. It’s Book 2. That’s because I reasoned that full-length, continuous novels should be...
November 30, 2016
I’ve been down the last couple of days. Work has been kicking my ass, chores and errands keep piling up, and I haven’t had much time to relax. I’d love to be writing my next book, I even had some time to work on it today—but I don’t do well with half measures. I long for a day when I can wake up leisurely, go through my morning routine without hurry, and then get lost in the worlds I write for hours...
November 29, 2016
Here’s a lesson I learned: When you’re tired, you shouldn’t stay up and finish one more thing. You should go to sleep so you can wake up tomorrow and do it when you’re rested. It’s not a lesson I always listen to, but I should. So I will. Zzz…...
November 28, 2016
I’m a bit of a nut for systems thinking, in case you haven’t noticed. I love finding better ways to do everything. I’m the kind of guy who will do five hours of work to figure out how to do a task in one hour, when I could have used another method to finish it in four hours. I put a great deal of effort into making the routine work of each day as effortless as possible. My goal: work now will mean I can be...
November 27, 2016
I love going to bars, and I appreciate that my day job (selling beer for a craft brewery) requires that I go to bars, because it forces me to do something that’s not always comfortable: go to social places alone and talk to strangers. The benefits of this are larger than you think. It’s undeniable that beer and other alcoholic beverages do damage. They’re drugs, and they can be abused. But they also do good, because a delicious beverage and a slight buzz...
November 26, 2016
I’ve struggled all my life with sleep, though not in a way that inspires pity or empathy. Historically, mine has been the ultimate sleep first world problem. It’s not that I can’t get to sleep—I can fall asleep within minutes, and can nap readily—it’s that I’ve always had trouble getting myself to go to bed. For a natural night owl who has always had so many things he wanted to do (like, ya know, write books), I have long had a habit of staying...
November 25, 2016
A little political musing tonight. I was reading an article earlier, about how President Obama might be better able to affect change in the Israel/Palestinian conflict from outside the oval office. It’s an interesting read, but more interesting to me is a question I’ve long had, and one for which the world hasn’t yet found the answer. If non-violent protest worked for American civil rights in the 1960’s, why hasn’t it worked for the Palestinians now? There’s almost certainly no clear-cut answer to that...