This morning smelled wet, with frost on the rooftops. I was hoping for snow. It’s falling now. The snow is fine; it falls like a thick mist, but heavier and whiter. The further away you look, the paler everything gets. Snow on the car. Snow on the fallen leaves I haven’t cleaned up yet. Snow …
Smart. Talented. Special. Gifted. Bright. Stupid. Unskilled. Ordinary. Average. Dull. If you’re not one, you must be the other, right? No: there’s a third set of descriptions that’s better than both of the ones above, and it goes like this: Hard worker. Dedicated. Pays attention. Asks questions. Practices. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am going to …
I suggested a review-swap with Chuck Wendig between Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse and his book Irregular Creatures, and, to my surprise, he agreed. A note: Chuck self-published Irregular Creatures as an e-book (even going so far as to commission the cover art from the excellent Amy Hauser). I am really impressed with the way he …
I snuggled next to Rachael as she fell asleep last night. Falling asleep, she has the same rhythms as a thunderstorm in the distance. Overall, the weather is calm, but series of lightning bolts twitch across the sky, something running all the way across the clouds, sometimes flashing off in a tight group. She …
When do we fail as writers? Logically, we fail when we don’t fail, that is, when we don’t try. It’s like the lottery: you can’t win if you don’t play. The odds of winning the Powerball Grand Prize are 1 in 195,249,054. The odds of winning the $3 ticket are 1 in 61.74. There are …
Yesterday was another good day. We started out with having Fry over to play magic. None of the three of us have played magic for years, and none of us played it very seriously. This belies, however, the thoroughness with which Fry learns and assimilates rules for any given circumstance. If we lived closer to …
I had a booksigning for Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse yesterday at the north Colorado Springs Borders (Chapel Hills), and it went well. I didn’t sell all the books this time, but that was because there were 100 of them. It was pleasant. I talked to a lot of people. I talked to a girl …
I have what is probably a fairly typical writer’s relationship with what is “good enough,” which is to say, “It’s not good enough.” Whatever it is. In some ways, this is a good thing, and I don’t want to lose it entirely; right now, it’s that nudge in my brain that’s saying, “Okay, you now …
I don’t know…I have visions of people breaking down in tears…”How could you say something so harsh?!?” — What’s a normal response to failure? Upset, despair, grief, horror, shame…? What’s an abnormal response to failure? Celebration! Amazement! Breaking out the champagne! And so we try to avoid failure and gravitate toward success, because failure feels …
All, I got invited to talk at the Pikes Peak Writer’s Conference in April! I completely bounced off the walls when I found out; I think it’s one of those things that I subconsciously marked at “a sign of success” but didn’t know it. When I’m making more $$$ as a freelancer, I’d like to …