“Outline – 1) A line showing the shape or boundary of something; 2) A statement or summary of the chief facts about something; 3) A sketch containing lines but no shading” – Oxford American Dictionary If you want to be a professional novelist, odds are that sooner
Read more →It’s been a little over a year since my mother died, and one of the things I inherited from her was her collection of cookbooks. It’s quite a collection, too. When Mom ran out of space on the kitchen cookbook shelf, she just started putting them elsewhere. I’ve taken three
Read more →It being the new year — and the first year of a new decade — I went poking around the web and noticed a bunch of websites for people’s New Year’s Resolutions. A little further investigation revealed that “write a book” is, in some form or another,
Read more →I keep running across people who think that there is One Right Way to write a story, and who tie themselves in knots trying to force themselves to write “the right way” when it doesn’t suit their particular mental processes. Somewhere, somehow, they’ve gotten convinced (usually because some
Read more →There’s a range of writing types, from people who hate revising and who want to write it down and be done with it, to people who can’t let go of anything and who keep changing it. The trick is to find a balance point that works for you.
Read more →The new modem is now working, but the wireless still isn’t. I probably should have expected it–it’s one of those corollaries of Murphy’s Law: The week before you leave home on a trip, everything that can go wrong will. But I am going to ignore my chore
Read more →So the first round of publicity appearances is over; I have two weeks now before Wiscon and the side trip to deal with pressing family business. When you’re working on a book, two weeks is not as much time as it sounds. I’m hoping to use the
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