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The hard spring of discontent is over just in time for summer. I am writing again after a two month hiatus (if you don’t count a couple of days in early June) having completed about a thousand words a day this long 4th of July weekend. The reasons for my break from writing are multiple; including a rough spot at work (unlike some authors, I have difficulty transforming my negative emotions into the written word — I just tend to seize up instead), a rash of reading and listening to books on CD/MP3, and a (semi-)daunting task of re-writing a critical scene in “The Alchemist of Liberty”.  During the down period I never lost the “wanting to want to write” feeling, so I knew it was just a matter of time.  Like the reasons for not writing, the reasons for starting to write again were multiple, including listening to P. G. Wodehouse, which always has a beneficial effect on my mood, and an increasing pressure of new ideas.

This rewrite comes on the very cogent plotting advice of Howard, an editor who has been kind enough to look at AoL, as well as “The Shaper’s Daughter”, and has given me encouragement and much needed critical feedback. (Thanks Howard!) While I am quite pleased with the rewrite (so far) it has grown beyond the size of the original (*sigh*, but this seems to be SOP for me).  I did try to reduce the number of characters involved in the scene, but this was only temporary and I wound up finding a handful of new characters.  I did succeed in distributing the infodumps across the scene and making the action more in tune with the main characters.

Then there are the handful of ideas that I’ve had for new stories and/or worldbuilding in the Nexus that I came up with during this dark period.  Feels good to be writing again, even if the mountain of words that I must spew forth has grown even larger.

Below the cut is a 2008 WorldCon attendance status page from my wiki. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m about to buy my Denver WorldCon memberships and am sending out probing email to the old “Brat Pack” (and few others) to see who might be planning on attending. Merideth (F., not D.-W.) will be driving out from Michigan with much listening to books on CD (like our journey to NASFIC last year). We will be taking our time and may stop in Omaha to see Merideth (D.-W., of course). On the way back I may try and make a swing through the Black Hills of SD, depending on timing and money.

Anybody from the old LASFS “Brat Pack” planning on attending? Drop me an eLine or comment.

Another Friday rolls around and I’ve got schlock load of links to share. Read the rest of this entry »

I started putting together a list of links to SF related wikis.  You can find the list here.  Oh, and if you know of any that I’ve missed, I’d like to hear about them.

It has been a while since I last did a link dump, so this one is rather large (281 links) and obnoxios.
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The other day I received an email that a friend and fellow writer sent out to the AAAWG email list. It was about how one handles pacing in a novel. Initially I didn’t have a cogent answer, and I still don’t think I have a satisfactory answer, but I ended up by responding with this:

I’m afraid I don’t really know how to answer this question as I have approached it primarily by gut feel. Perhaps a more honest answer is that I have really ignored the question of pacing and just wrote the novel (or short story) with the assumption that it would work out as I went. One (implied) concession to pacing is that as I near the end of a major draft I read the story through as fast as I can (no edits) and see how it hangs together. I think one of the things I am trying to determine when I do these quick reads is to see if I have achieved a good pace. One of my stock questions to my beta-readers is about pacing and I rely on their less-biased feedback. You can also tell a lot about pacing by asking your beta-readers when they put your story down (or just give up) to do other things.
Anyways, that’s my pre-published opinion.

Anyone want to share their insight into pacing a novel?

How very cool! A noir novel by Roger Zelazny lost for thirty years to be published by Hard Case Crime. The Dead Man’s Brother is due out in Feb. of 2009. You can also check out an excerpt.

Merideth, John, and I went to see Speed Racer last night. Here’s a my mini-review:

If you overlook the simplistic plot, trite clichés, and the not infrequent wooden acting, it was a visually spectacular. Eyeball laceratingly spectacular. Don’t go see Speed Racer if you can be induced to vomit just by watching bright colors in motion. Do go see Speed Racer if you want to see the closest thing to a live-action cartoon (yet).

Another week, another 89 links. Read the rest of this entry »