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I had a writer ask me this question in my slush queue, after I rejected his story.  (I told him the story wasn’t what the editor was probably looking for and it had some other issues, which I gave him my opinion on, briefly.) I thought other writers might get something out of the answer, […]

I take New Years’ Resolutions semi-seriously; I treat it as a chance to stop and assess where I am as a writer. I don’t usually post about my goals, though, not because they’re private, but because I have felt that I’m not good enough at writing to possibly succeed at the wild goals I have.

I hear this question: Is steampunk dead? (Actually, I hear, “Is it dead yet? Now is it dead yet? How about now?) I’m going to set aside the issue of whether I like steampunk or not. I think ~punk will continue to evolve. Other ~punks, like dieselpunk, are shoving their way onto the scene; whether

I’ve formatted three books for Lulu.com now (for private use only), and I’m going to record my lessons here, mostly for my own benefit, because I keep having to look things up! Lulu.com is a place where you can self-publish your own books; I’ve been using it to make copies of books for gifts. Part

In all honor of Tom T. Hall, I hereby make this satire: In some of my songs I have casually mentioned The fact that I like to eat brains This little song is more to the point Roll out the corpse and don’t mind the stains… I like brains. They’re good gray, pink, or pus-rotted

You’re probably not reading this unless you, too, worked on NaNoWriMo this year. I had a blast; I hope you did, too. But now, I must analyze and rant. No, you may not read what I wrote yet.  I mean, you could read it, if you wanted to see what my first drafts look like,

I don’t know about you, but as I write a book, I generally build a playlist for it on Youtube. 1) Youtube is free (I’ll go back and buy copies when I can, but a lot of these are ???) 2) Youtube has some weird shit that I have trouble finding elsewhere. 3) Youtube is

I was really straining to try to come up with something deep for my blog over the last few days. “I have to write something for release day…I better make it good!” Yeah, I’m sick, and most of my functionally witty brain cells have curled up with a cup of hot water (all I can

I had a really good run of slush stories to read for Apex Magazine in the last few days; I sent up about three issues worth of stories to the editor, Cat Valente. Yay! Good stories! But there were some stories in there that didn’t make my personal cut, and I’ve been trying to figure

Since a couple of writers whose advice I generally follow have posted on the nature of distraction (and because I’ve made my wordcount for the day), I’m going to chime in here. Believe me, I understand the irony of writing a distracting blog entry about how to resist distractions.  I prefer to think of it