I don’t like leaving potential cash sitting on the table. Why have money sitting someplace where it’s not invested, or at least earning some sort of minuscule interest in a savings account? I feel the same way about short stories. If a short story has an ending, it’s no good to anyone hidden away on […]
“Write Drunk and Edit Sober”
“Write drunk; edit sober.” That quote is often attributed to Hemingway, although I’m not sure it’s ever been confirmed that he ever actually said it. I do think it’s a great quote though for a couple of reasons. First, if you want to take it literally, then by all means do just that. If writing […]
First Person Mistakes in Dialogue and Thoughts
My first novel was written in the first person. I’d say somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of my short stories are as well. For a lot of people, writing in the first person can be one of the most challenging ways to write. For others, it can be much easier than third person. For me, […]
Five Ways Writers Abuse Twitter
As a writer, I love Twitter. It’s an incredible tool for connecting with other writers, promoting my own stuff, and just killing time when time needs killing. But it’s not all rainbows and roses. (Or scotch and cigars.) There are certain things writers do on Twitter that are guaranteed to not only result in an […]
The Two “Non-fiction” Books that Kept Me Up at Night
With Halloween was just a couple of nights away and the real horror show taking place in the US on November 8 (har har), I thought it would be fun to talk a little more on my favorite genre. As I’ve probably repeated over and over, I love horror more than most things. I love […]
The Brainstorming Rat Race and Ideas that Go Nowhere
More often than I’d like to admit, there have been plenty of nights where I looked through my works in process and just said, “Eh, let’s start something new.” Sadly, especially half a decade ago when I first started writing (geesh, I’m getting old), this would end up morphing into an entire night wasted in […]
Writing Resources: Scrivener
Regular readers of this site may know that I’ve been going back and forth between writing a new novel and working on (extremely painful) revisions of another. Part of the problem with the revisions is that I started the novel with very little sense of direction, so a lot of the characters still run together, […]
The Best Advice I’ve Received from Rejection Letters
I like to think of writing as the business of collecting No’s. You can’t be a writer unless you’re willing to be told “No” every now and then. And by “every now and then,” I mean repeatedly–day in and day out. Since I first started writing short stories, I’ve received 173 rejections and 19 non-responses. […]
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