So for the last thirty years or so, whenever I’ve been working on a book or short story (which has been most of the time), I would do it in the mornings before going (or, since our office closed, “going”) to work. Also, for the past 15 years or so, when I’ve been working on the blog—mostly not this one, of course, but rather, the one with the animals on it—I’ve been doing that in the mornings befor work, too, or else on the weekends. But it’s only the last year or so that I’ve been trying to work on a book and do a daily post on the animals’ blog, and that, it turns out, is just a little too much to manage.
Continue reading “A Change Of Scenery”Tag: novels
Paper
103,000 words = 215 letter-sized pages. Seems like it should add up to more, doesn’t it?
Do You Have A Partially Completed Manuscript?
It’s been a while since I did a Random Rejection, so this week I thought I would reach into my giant file folder of writing correspondence and pull something out of it. But instead of either a rejection or an acceptance letter, I drew this instead:
Continue reading “Do You Have A Partially Completed Manuscript?”
Scene of the Month: Dragon Stones
The votes are in (although about half the time this month I forgot to include the poll in the weekly post) and the winner by a landslide for the next Scene of the Month is perennial favorite Dragon Stones! Will The Wolf ever come out on top again? Who knows? But the moral is, werewolves shouldn’t mess with dragons, on account of dragons breathe fire. At least my dragons do.
Scene-Of-The-Month: “Dragon Stones”
The votes are in and the readers’ choice for this week’s scene of the month is Dragon Stones. Randomly flipping through the book, I stopped here, towards the end, where the dragon has finally cut loose on her enemies. Burn, baby, burn!
Scene(s)-Of-The-Month: September 2009
The votes have been counted (or more accurately, the percentages have been looked at) and for the first time since I started the Scene-Of-The-Month, we have a tie! Dragon Stones and The Wolf each received 49% of the votes. Now we could have a runoff election, but what fun would that be? Instead, here is one scene from each.
Scene-Of-The-Month Poll
New posts will appear underneath this post
Scene-Of-The-Month: June 2009
The results of voting are in and once again Dragon Stones is the readers’ choice for a scene of the month! Taking the book off the shelf and flipping to a random page got me this scene, which is quite near the beginning and, once again, involves some misfortune befalling poor Adaran. There really is a dragon in this book, honest — in fact, in this scene, Adaran and his companions have just returned from a raid on her lair. I just haven’t pulled any scenes yet in which the dragon actually appears. But if Dragon Stones keeps winning the polls, I’m sure she will turn up here eventually.
Just a reminder: The Dragon Stones PDF file can be found here.
Auction for Soldiers’ Angels
Anyone who has been reading here for a while has no doubt seen comments from Kristen Tsetsi, a fellow small-press/self-published author. You may also remember my short review of her terrific Operation Iraqi Freedom novel Homefront last year. Now Kristen is preparing an eBay auction to benefit Soldiers’ Angels. From the Soldier’s Angels website:
Soldiers’ Angels is a volunteer-led 501(c)(3) non-profit organization providing aid and comfort to the men and women of the United States Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and their families.
I’ve given one copy each of all four of my published books (just the novels, not the anthologies) to the auction, which also includes a number of other books (including vintage books such as a 1953 copy of The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway), photographs and other artwork, jewelry, and more. Rather than reiterate everything that Kristen will be listing, I would encourage you to visit her blog and view the variety of items that people have donated to the auction. It’s for a good cause, and Kristen always has something there worth reading.
New Feature: Scene-Of-The-Month
This is a feature that my wife suggested a while ago: Putting up a few random paragraphs from my books once a month or so. She also suggested putting up a poll so readers can choose which book they want to see excerpted. My wife is so smart! Here’s the poll:
The books are tagged (broadly) by genre: “F” for Fantasy, “H” for Horror, and “DF” for Dark Fantasy (essentially fantasy with a strong horror element, or horror with a strong fantasy element). At the end of the month, I will choose a scene at random from the book with the most votes and put it into a post. I won’t choose scenes that give away major plot twists, but other than that, pretty much anything will go.
I’ve decided to start with the prologue from my nowhere-near-finished werewolf novel (unimaginative working title: The Wolf). It’s a very short scene, but I like it.
Viscosity 