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Books I was recommended: Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The Silence, by Tim Lebbon The Well-Fed Writer, by Peter Bowerman This list is shorter than I like, but I do have permission to ask Jonathan Maberry for some good action/horror titles. Book to Study: The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, as per Laura Hayden’s mystery […]

I’ve never understood Book of the Month clubs.  But then…I read a lot of books.* I signed up for a clothes of the month club, basically.  AND WHOAH.  THEY SEND ME CLOTHES I LIKE AND I DON’T HAVE TO BE OVERWHELMED WITH ALL THE SHOPPING AND MORE OFTEN THAN NOT THEY FIT. Am I willing to

November was a busy month.  No NaNoWriMo, but I still accomplished about 130,000 words this month all told. Finished the ghostwritten adventure thriller, finally. WHEW.  Soundtrack:  Vocal Sea Shanties. Finished the ghostwritten cozy (second in its series) on time, although with changes to the plot.  The stuff in the outline wasn’t working, and the client

November was a kind of tipping point for me, although what it is exactly that I tipped between, I’m not sure.  It feels like I tipped between “not confident” and “confident” on a personal level, as in, “She is a confident person.”  But where that came from or what it means, I don’t know.  It’s probably

Something I’m exhausted of lately: The kind of drama that comes from people who want more from you than they’re willing to give. Sometimes that drama comes in very polite packages, and it’s only when you step back can you assess what’s not being done or said and strip the message down to its core

This morning is not the world’s greatest morning for a packaged sound bite about writing.  The World Fantasy Awards have been released and nothing that I read and liked won.  There’s a new conflict about how to handle serial sexual harassers in an entertainment industry adjacent to mine–everyone agrees that they should be handled, but

I woke up last night out of a nightmare due to the fact that I don’t have a list of tasks longer than my arm to accomplish STAT, only things that I really ought to get to sooner rather than later, and I was worried that I missed something vital.  In the dream, my teeth

Personally, I think if you’re going to end a horror story on an “everybody dies” note, it has to be because the characters chose it that way OR out of irony when they do everything right but it still doesn’t work, not because they oopsed into failure.  If the situation was always hopeless, there never

One of the worst parts about continuously growing as a writer is having to unpick lessons that I have oh-so-painfully learned.  It would be nice if I could look at the situation as putting down a crutch I no longer need–but there’s far more work involved on my part.  I have to do it slowly

This marketing stuff gets a little easier.  As I try different things, as I get more feedback from readers, I’m starting to realize who my readers are and what they want.  Why me?  Why not Stephen King?  Or rather why me and Stephen King? What they want tells me how to market (not that I’m