Tabula Motherfuckin’ Rasa

I finished The Boyfriends Tie the Knot on Thursday and actually took the weekend off. (Happy belated Pride, Pride-goers! Kid and I and one of her de facto aunties took off for the beach for our annual Pride weekend beach trip in lieu of going to the parade this year. Maybe next year. Maybe.) TBTTK is the seventh and final official story in the Scientific Method series, and you'll all see it on August 6. It's left me in a strange creative lull, like when you paddle out beyond the waves forming and hit this stillness on the water. The Scientific

June 30th, 2014|Categories: blog|Tags: , |

Process, Process, Process

So it's a bit of a thread running through my stories--all of my stories, dating back to playing with imaginary friends as a kid--that people process their shit, sometimes to abstraction. (The Green Day song "Redundant" does a good job illustrating this, though I rarely listen to it, because: redundant.) It's four o'clock and I turn into a pumpkin at five. I had a day job task that took two hours of my five devoted work hours today, and will take three or four of my work hours tomorrow. And this week? I have a Scientific Method story, Breaking Down,

June 2nd, 2014|Categories: blog|Tags: , |

Nerdy Writer Post: Outlining

Before I'm not especially devoted to either planning or pantsing stories. (Pantsing, yes, by the seat of your pants you scribble your way through the story.) I will say that since I started "outlining" stories, my first drafts are cleaner and my revisions are less intensive. But I don't do roman numerals alternating with letters and numbers. I don't outline like they taught us in school. I stayed away from outlining for probably five years longer than I needed to, because I associated it with dreary classrooms and stifled creativity. Note to teachers: maybe not so much with the rules.

May 27th, 2014|Categories: blog|Tags: , , , |

Writerly Paralysis

I'm starting a novel. Oh. Well. I'm starting the second draft of a novel, but it's a rewrite-every-word draft, not a revision, really. This story? I wrote the first draft basically with my eyes closed. It was in some ways a very easy book to write: it came to me staring at a blank new document, and from a sparked idea to the last word typed I wrote straight through without detours or distractions. It took about two weeks. In other ways, it was terrifically hard to write, about hard things, and I'm afraid to revisit it because I have

March 28th, 2014|Categories: blog|Tags: , , , |