Yesterday evening I completed the beta draft of “Winters’ Unexpected Arrival” at 8,971 words. I am planning on another tweak-polish pass with a focus on “tack-on” phrases. Oh yes, and to make sure all the numbers, dates, and etc. line up. My “story a month project” continues on track with WUA, the third story in three months.

WUA (polish phase)

WUA (polish phase)

WUA (polish phase)

Link dump for Friday, 2008/10/24 after the cut. The wiki version includes a tag cloud. Read the rest of this entry »

WUA (polish phase)

WUA (polish phase)

You can get a free issue of the July/August 2008 Weird Tales here.

WUA (polish phase)

WUA (polish phase)

WUA (polish phase)

Yesterday I finished up the barf phase of “Winters’ Unexpected Arrival”.  Interestingly enough, the word count for WUA stands at 7440 as I go into the polish phase.  I had set a pretty much arbitrary goal of 7500 words for this short story, and there it is.  My writing process is generative all the up until the very end when I do the “that hunt” and other related final polish activities.  I expect that it will be somewhere between 8500 and 9000 words by the time I’m done.

Speaking of which, it looks like I am on schedule to finish the story by the end of the month.  This is the first regular month in my “story a month project”, and it’s nice to know that I am keeping to the schedule that I have set for myself.  I started the “story a month project” in mid-August (after being inspired by a panel / lecture at WorldCon) and took on “The Unmodified Man”, which was partially complete, with the expectation that I could get it done by the end of August.  No such luck.  It ended up taking until the middle of September to complete (going from around 3000 words to 11,500 words).  Then I “cheated” by reworking a the prologue of “Tactics of Transience” into “Death’s Harp has One String” (something that I had been wanting to do for some time) and that fit neatly into the later half of September.  Which brings me back to October and “Winters’ Unexpected Arrival”.

WUA (barf phase)

WUA (barf phase)

Link dump for Friday 2008/10/17 after the cut. Visit the wiki version, now including a tag cloud. Read the rest of this entry »

WUA (barf phase)

Just received Schlock Mercenary: Terraport Wars in the mail. Very cool. By the way, if you like good space opera with a humorous twist, go check it out here. Its posted daily (and he hasn’t missed once), but be warned, the web comic goes back to June of 2000. It took me about six months to get caught up.

I ordered Schlock Mercenary: Terraport Wars at WorldCon in Denver this last August while I was buying copies of the previous Schlock books from their ever gracious and talented author Howard Taylor and his wife Sandra. He kindly personalized them with an illustration each (a con special).

Thanks Howard!

WUA (barf phase)

Check out this tool to find just the word you are looking for.

I’ve added it to my “reference desk”.

IO9 has posted more links to Frazetta’s SF art here.

One of the aspects of writing that I find most intriguing and a great deal of fun is when a story takes an unanticipated turn and I find myself exploring new aspects of character, plot, setting, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

WUA (barf phase)

Drop by RayGunRevival.com for your latest fix of space opera SF (PDF file).

Check out this Frazetta concept art on the Sci-Fi-O-Rama blog.

OpenOffice, the open source alternative to MS Office and my writing tool of choice, has released version 3.0.  You can get it here.  A little review of this release can be found here.