Thought-Drive

First off: thanks. To everyone who reads this, reliably, or just the once. Even on accident. You make the list of things I'm thankful for this year. Other notables on the are the warm, fuzzy feeling I have concerning next year and looking back on the decisions I made this past one (see, I'm doing it, too, winding the year forward faster than the calendar). So, I can talk about the writing that got done with a fresh mind for once because I wrote this very morning. Off work for Turkey Day, I felt that I owed it to myself to tend to an additional chapter this week. I think the secondary goal is to hit 20 before   the new year hits me. The chapter went well, even threw in a bit of extemporaneous plot that didn't seem too horrid (as I was writing it, that is; remember I said that for when I get around to editing it into the 3rd draft). Also, this past weekend I had the occasion to do some legitimate research for that short story. And by legitimate I mean leaving the house, l...

A couple years ago I wrecked my car, which sucked at the time. It turns out that without any transportation, that summer proved to be the most productive time in my writing life. I finished the draft of a 90,000 word novel in thirty days, my first completed book. Fast forwarding to now glosses over a lot of struggle with the manuscript, mostly over trying to convince publishers that it would, in fact, be an awesome story for readers to discover their way through. Clerical error stretched out its shelf life, in such time I became a much better and wiser author, and thankfully so, because I better see now what it's going to take to push that particular round peg through the square holes provided to me. And I think I'm mostly good with that. So I think I've turned a corner, and will be able to look back on this time as a decisive fork in the long and winding road, and will smile at my decision. I'm not going to stop working on the series, but after the book I'm curre...

The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. Love that quote, almost enough to look up who said it, then really figure out who said it. I totally dropped the ball last week. In fact, it wasn't until Thursday that I realized that I hadn't blogged. I wouldn't describe the winter season as busy, either. It just slipped off my mind and didn't stick back on until much later. But I have been writing, both this past weekend and the one before it. I even squeezed in some academic scribbling as well. My students had some opinions about a Jack London story that were different from my own, and I thought it was an excellent time to show them how arguments go down among literary types. Initially, I intended to comb through the story for quotes that proved my point, but what started as some light reading during a lunch break ended up being a few pages of rhetoric. It was the first time that I had taken to something like that seriously since graduating college. I wasn...