Posts Tagged ‘novel’

Abandoning The First Novel To Write A Newer Novel?

June 29, 2011 by · 1 Comment
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Several years ago I set out to write my first novel within a year, following a broad outline and writing several pages a day. A year and one week later, I had finished writing the rough draft in 2008. Alas, a rough draft it remains to this day. My first novel about video game testers [...]

Keeping A Secret Writing Identity In Silicon Valley

April 28, 2011 by · Comments Off
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When I became serious about writing five years ago, I did Google search on my name before I started submitting my short stories. Lo and behold, there was another person with my name who claimed to be a writer; he hadn’t published much—if anything at all—from what I can tell. I decided to combine the [...]

The Emotional Baggage That A Male Reader Brings To The Novel

March 31, 2011 by · 2 Comments
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Several months ago I started downloading free fiction ebooks from Amazon for the Kindle App on my iPod Touch. I normally don’t read fiction ebooks since I’m a dead tree traditionalist who prefer flipping the pages of paperbacks. Two years of unemployment and three months of being underemployed doesn’t leave much money for buying stacks [...]

A NaNoWriMo Flash Short Story Collection

November 3, 2010 by · Comments Off
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Last year I had planned on taking up the 2010 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) competition by completing the remaining 50,000 words for my second novel (1/3 done at 25,000 words) this month. I also expected revising my first novel to be done by now, which didn’t happen since editing a novel-length manuscript is really, really [...]

Hitting A Brick Wall In Revising The Novel

October 27, 2010 by · Comments Off
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October was a lousy month. I blame the flu shot that I got last month for making me feel lousy and giving me a serious case of the blahs. I didn’t feel like editing, revising or writing for most of the month. It wasn’t writer’s block per se. It was more like that I lacked [...]

Letting Short Stories Lie Fallow

September 1, 2010 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Editing, Fiction, Submissions 
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This summer I took a break from the boring admin tasks of keeping 35+ short stories in circulation by letting them lay fallow after coming back with rejection slips to focus my time on revising my first novel. My tracking spreadsheet turned red over the last three months. Only a few recent short stories that [...]

The Writer’s Workflow

June 27, 2010 by · Comments Off
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Note: This blog post originally appeared on 12 June 2008 for my personal website, and updated here with notes. Writing this past month [May 2008] became easier when I found my natural rhythm for the workflow. Since the project manager at my job told me to walk away from work at lunch time, I been [...]

Editing In A Creative Daze

June 20, 2010 by · Comments Off
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Note: This blog post originally appeared on 7 May 2008 for my personal website, and updated here with notes. When writing my first novel stalled out after ten pages last month [April 2008], I switched gears to finish editing my long neglected vampire novella. If I can’t finish a novella with a half-dozen characters, 18,000 words [...]