In which I wax on about a Gaiman writing metaphor.

I'm currently watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voFDz4o6H9g (That's here, if you're on a text reader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voFDz4o6H9g) Early in this clip, Neil Gaiman talks about dry rock walls. And how the folks who build them start with a pile of fucking rocks and just keep putting one rock down, then another beside it, then another, fitting them all together, and when they're done they have this incredibly strong, stable wall. I'm so loving this for a metaphor right now for books. I have written a lot of books. Someone held me up as a writer they wanted to emulate a few weeks ago, and

January 12th, 2017|Categories: blog|Tags: |

New Series! (CLASSIFIED SERIES.) Writerly stuff!

I'm about to start a new series. Well. I say that now. But it's geared toward traditional publishing, so if my agent sends me THERE IS NO WAY THAT COULD EVER SELL DON'T BOTHER WRITING IT feedback, I'll probably shelve it. But. I don't think she's gonna say that. I am so excited. I can't even. And it's a kind of goofy idea, really, but whatever, I'm stoked about it. And. Also. I'm being way more deliberate this time around. Let's talk process! The Old Way So basically I used to just write stuff. No outlines, no notes, no tracking anything.

January 3rd, 2017|Categories: blog|Tags: , , |
  • Trusty Gavel

Let’s Talk About…Authority in Writing

A lot of conversations have been had lately about writerly responsibility to accurately represent in their books cultural experiences they have not had. There are a lot of things that...discomfit me about this conversation. Like the fact that apparently some writers need to be told this is a thing? When let's be clear: we have always been a hundred percent responsible for not writing racist bullshit. (Unless, of course, that was our goal. Presumably I'm not talking to anyone here for whom "inciting race war" is a goal for fiction.) Also: I'm all for people writing characters who are not

May 6th, 2016|Categories: blog|Tags: , , |

Portrait of the scribbler…

I'm sitting in my brother's living room right now while the kid watches Fireman Sam. And not the old Welsh version. This is some kind of dubbed-but-with-actors-trying-to-match-Welsh-speech-patterns new Fireman Sam that just hit Amazon. It kills me. The original version was moralistic and annoying; the new version is moralistic and wrong.  But at least it's not Caillou. Shit could always be worse. I have, in another tab, the playlist for the book I'm writing. (Oh, interested? I keep thinking about doing a post about this book and...not. Playlist here.) It's on Madonna's "Like a Prayer" right now. The book, for future reference, is Queers of La Vista

October 9th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , |
  • Slworking edit by Eric Schmuttenmaer, on Flickr

My Love-Hate Relationship with Final Revisions

[Er, so, I just unearthed this in my drafts folder. Apparently I scheduled it to publish on December 15, but it never actually...published. This happens in Wordpress sometimes, but not consistently, which is one of the reasons I'm clearing out my drafts folder. In any case, I present to you a time capsule from two months ago.] Polish read number seven. Y'all, the ghost story is almost ready to rock and roll. It's only just occurred to me that I don't put polish reads on my to do list, and they take up huge, massive amounts of time. Just ridiculous

February 24th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , |

Oh, goals. You’re so cute.

When I started publishing, I thought I wanted to write full time. That was my only goal. I wanted to write fiction full time and quite the day job. That, my friends, was a child's goal. It was, and still is, a good goal, but it was overly simplistic, and assumed a world of do this or don't do this. When in reality, as we know, though I keep having to remind myself, each decision is made up of a million tiny decisions, a million incremental shifts one way or the other. That's the whole "slippery slope" thing, right? "It's a slippery slope!

January 11th, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , |

Oh, research. I love you.

So I try to always have three projects running at once: one is being written, one is being revised, and one is in pre-write. Pre-write is sometimes code for obesessively thinking about the story, but there's usually an element of research involved. And oh, right now? Right now I'm loving the shit out of my research. (Full disclosure: I'm a fuckin' nerd. I pretty much always fall in love with research.) I have this idea for another serial. And right now, in the glorious early stages of it, I don't even have to know my characters that well (though I'm

January 2nd, 2015|Categories: blog|Tags: , , |