I just finished Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland.  Fun stuff, if you’re into process, which I am.  (If you’re not, you may want to skip this.)  It seems like a no-brainer:  meta-skills, like learning how to learn, make everything else easier, faster, and even more enjoyable. […]

A question came up on how to display emotions of characters without blatantly stating them.  My take on it goes like this: — We can’t really talk about how to write character emotions without taking a second to lay down a base assumption about fiction:  The most efficient way is generally not the best way. The most efficient

Having just reread The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (and having typed some parts of it in), I’m struck  by…I don’t know if I can sum this up well, but here goes: Classic ghost stories are often about things that the characters (and perhaps the audience) absolutely, positively MUST NOT KNOW; if you confront them

So a couple of years ago I started tracking my word counts:  how many new words produced daily.  I did pretty well, producing over half a million words two years running.  Over a million words!  Woo! However…at the same time I started tracking word counts, I experienced a massive reduction in putting out new indie work,

This Friday, for our fabulous Friday promotion, I have stuff of my own to talk up.   Alice: The last episode of Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Still Hearts is up.  ERK.  I may have given myself an ulcer over it, although it does now have the ending that really ought to be there

I just finished William S. Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, and, strangely, what I took out of it was a better understanding of the idea of spine. What I usually get when I ask about spine is this slightly annoyed look that I always end up interpreting as shouldn’t you know this already? Well, yes, I’ve heard all kinds of things

I am on a horror reading project with two friends of mine and yours, MB Partlow and Shannon Lawrence, and am currently working on the Nightmare Magazine Top 100 Horror Books list.  I am reading (or re-reading) everything that I don’t have on Goodreads.  You can find the entire list of what I’ve read so

It’s so hard to even think with the news about Terry Pratchett and other things going on. This morning after journaling (why deep things hit me after I’ve walked away from the paper I don’t know, but they do), I realized that there is this idea in my writing space that shouldn’t be there and

On a scale of 1-10, here are my eights and nines, the nines being starred.  No tens this month. Notes: Fantastic Stories does more reprints than originals (I’m trying to skip the reprints so I have more time for originals), but the two originals were both eights this month. Nightmare does half and half on

Okay, last Friday, I was swamped.  This Friday, I’m busy but mostly I just want to lounge about and pretend I’m shagged out after doing taxes.  Or work on a TV pilot, because who would I be if I weren’t biting off more than I can chew? I didn’t have time to get the edits in