What’s Your Definition of Success?

When will you have succeeded? If you close your eyes and envision your life, what is it that you see yourself doing or being that shows you that you've met your goal? That you've achieved your dream? Be honest. Be concrete. Be specific.  Then figure out what it takes to get there.   I have …

The First Three Things I Downloaded to my eReader

For Christmas, I received a first generation Kindle Fire.  I want to be able to read comics by the issue, and digital is clearly the way to go if I don't want to face storage problems. Here are the first three things I downloaded to the new gadget: Ms Marvel, issue #1 Steelheart by Brandon …

NaNoWriMo 2013: Post Mortem

I like the project process of summing up the results of what has been attempted and achieved with a "post mortem" summary.  It allows me to see with clear hindsight what lessons there were to be learned along the way. This is my list of lessons learned this year during NaNoWriMo.  I hit 50K words …

Three Things I’m Working On This Week

Sometimes I break my to do lists up into categories so I can get a smattering of things done across them. (This means doing some of the things I have to do, and balancing them with things I want to do.)  One of the category sets I like to use is "Beginning, Maintaining, and Finishing," …

Three things I’ve learned about myself this week

1. My writing / drafting style has not changed as drastically as I thought.  When I decided on my NaNoWriMo processes, I sincerely thought that I had changed how I rough draft. I was sure that with all of my experience, I would be adding sensory details and showing only what the camera could see …

“Real” Writers and “Real” Authors

{steps on soapbox} ahem-hem. I am a real writer because I write.  I'm a writer because I have to write on a regular basis in order to stay sane.  I write as my chosen form of creativity.  All of the above qualify me for the title Writer.  Yes, in the past, I've been paid to write …

Deadline…. Missed.

If you'll recall, I set myself a deadline earlier this month.  The idea was to push through this final polishing round of edits on Salvaged and then get cracking on agent queries by the end of August. Well, today is September 1, and I have not yet finished. I'm not discouraged by this. First of all, …

Female Sci-fi Authors v. Myths About Girls, Math and Science

I've been doing a lot of seriously depressing reading about how many women have chosen male pen-names or gender-neutral pen-names over the history of the genre.  The most famous and current of these is J.K. Rowling, who was advised by publishers that little boys wouldn't want to read a book written by "Jo Rowling". That …

On the Shelf: Ilona Andrews

Ilona Andrews is a pen-name for a husband and wife team who write a series of urban fantasy novels set here in Atlanta.  I've mentioned their work in passing before (Kate Daniels is just one of the strong female characters they've co-created). How I found them I actually read the series short story prequel Questionable Client, …