writing

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POINT OF VIEW: Navigating the Interregnums

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pause - pixabay

interregnum /ˌin(t)ərˈreɡnəm/ noun1) a period when normal government is suspended, especially between successive reigns or regimes.2) an interval or pause between two periods of office or other things. The world is holding its breath. As I sit here writing this, I find myself living through a number of nested interregnums. We’re still in the throes of the Great Pause, as the world tries to figure out how to live with, and ultimately get to living without, Covid-19. Here in the US, we’re in the interregnum between administrations, holding our breath and waiting for the madness of King Trump to come … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Short

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Yellow pencil - Deposit Photos

For most of my life I considered myself a novel writer. Novels were my preferred reading length – I love getting lost in an epic story with lots of room to explore. Give me five-hundred pages, a thousand even, and let me roam in your world. And if it’s an epic series of 10+ books? I am so there, with reading glasses on. So it’s curious that I find myself writing lots of shorts these days too. Don’t get me wrong. I still LOVE novels (reading and writing them), and have two in progress with a third soon to be … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Hope

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forest path - hope - pixabay

As a sci-fi author, I have written a number of times before about our responsibility to forecast the future, both to warn the world about what might be coming, and to share my hopes for what we might become. In these last few years, I have written four separate columns about the idea of hope and writing. In these fraught several weeks before the US election, I find myself hoping against hope for change, and then fearing the worst. Every day, there’s a new poll that reinforces that hope, and a new piece of news that dashes it. Biden’s up … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: The Mutable Future

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crystal ball - pixabay

I just finished a new short story called “High Seven,” which takes place 150 years from now in a future where the world has devolved into a series of city-states that are holding on as best they can against the ravages of climate change. My view of the future has dimmed markedly over the last twenty years, and even more so over the last four. It’s hard now to see a future that’s not defined by climate change, one way or another. I still have hope, and my stories reflect that, but it’s a hope that somehow we’ll manage to … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: (Re)Defining Success

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checklist - pixabay

I’m in the middle of Pitch Wars, an annual contest to find a mentor who will then help you prep your manuscript for an agent submission showcase next spring. This is my second year participating in this amazing and terrifying event. Last year, I went into it blind, fully expecting to snag a mentor, and having no idea how many thousands of writers were doing the same thing at the same time. My four mentors received our pitches, and I waited, hopeful that I would receive a response, or maybe even more than one. A day passed, then two and … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Is My Escape From Pandemic World

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space portal - deposit photos

As I write this, I am sitting in the parking lot at the grocery store waiting for our weekly grocery curbside pick-up. It struck me, driving over here, how small my world has become since the pandemic began. Once a week I leave home to go to the post office, then to the grocery store, and then back home again. Every four weeks, I plug in the Prius to charge up for the next month. I’ve been doing this now for more than six months, and only on a couple occasions have I gone farther than this two-mile radius from … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Upping the Odds

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gambling - deposit photos

Some writers seem to have an innate sense of the publishing marketplace, surfing adroitly from one trend to another, catching every wave and riding it to success.  The rest of us aren’t so lucky. I’ve been writing seriously for six years now, and I can’t lay claim to catching a single trend. Trends are, by nature, often short and ephemeral – so unless you can turn around a book in ninety days (and some writers can and do) they are notoriously hard to catch. My first book took me five years to write. I did my second book in thirty … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Without a Win

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Waiting room - deposit photos

It’s been 7,464 hours since my last sale. Not that I’m counting. Honestly, it’s partly my own fault. In October last year fell into a bit of a … let’s call it a rough patch, since we’re not dealing with clinical depression here, and I don’t want to minimize those who suffer from it. Still, I basically stopped writing for months. I’d just finished and published the last of my two trilogies, and had wrapped up a novel, submitted it to Pitch Wars, and then utterly failed to even attract a full manuscript request. Since then, I’ve thrown myself into … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Put a Wolf Under the Table

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wolf snarl - deposit photo

Your characters are on a quest for the fabled Sword of Bighands. They’re sitting around a thick iron-banded wooden table at the Borderlands Pub, a dark, seedy local hangout where you can buy anything from drugs to human slaves. Or a really good guide to get you out of Bordertown and across the great Scorched Desert, to the fabled Treasure Lands across that hot, dry, shimmering expanse of red sand. Your characters are talking about the long trek ahead, sharing war stories, and sipping on curiously ice-cold mead. And they’re absolutely bored out of their gourds. So what can you … Read more