[I] am a child of the 80s. At least, I think I am. I was nearly 8 years old when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 1980, and nearly 18 ten years later. In my book, the awareness of an 8-18-year old during the 1980s qualifies as being a child of that decade. It…
[N]ow that Mike Brotherton has made the official public announcement, I am so excited to announce that I’ve been selected as one of the attendees for the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. The workshop runs from July 14-21, which makes July a busy month for me. But I’m excited about it…
[Y]esterday marked 100 consecutive days of fiction-writing for me, a feat that I have never come close to equaling in the past. I suspect that part of the reason it took me 14 years of writing stories and submitting them before selling my first one was because I didn’t write every day. Eventually I did…
[I]tem #1: I learned that I had a very positive review of my story, “The Negative Impact of Climate Change on the Unusual Beasts of the World.” The story appeared in the July/August issue of Analog. The review appeared in Tangent Online. Here is what the reviewer had to say about my (short) story: Jamie…
[I] don’t know if other writers were like me, but when I first decided I wanted to be a writer, part of it was driven by some innate desire to tell stories, and part of it was driven by, what seemed to me, to be the glamor of being a science fiction writer. I’d read a lot…
[T]oday is a significant day in my recent writing streak. It is my 88th consecutive day of writing fiction. That may seem like an unusual number to seem significant, but it is significant nevertheless. Throughout the previous 87 days, my daily fiction writing had been done at home, in available scraps of time, usually in…
[N]ext month, my writers group is holding a lecture called “Marketing Yourself as a Writer.” There is no description of what the lecture entails, other than the title, but I find that when I see people discussing “marketing yourself as a writer,” either in lecture form or as a blog post, I get squirmy. I…
[I]t has been a little over 2 months since I put in place automated processes for capturing data about my daily writing, blogging and reading. And given that I have reading, written, and blogged nearly every day for the last two months, it seems like a good time to share some of the numbers with…
[I] was home with the Little Man yesterday and so I had a little more time than usual to get in some writing. Turned out to be a record-setting day for me–at least for the 65 days that I’ve been keeping automated records: I managed to write nearly 3,200 words of fiction yesterday, which,…
[I]f writing was like baseball, and each writing session represented a hit, then I suppose you could say that yesterday, I bested Joe DiMaggio for the consecutive game hitting streak record. Joe is famous, in part, for having hit safely in 56 consecutive ball games back in 1941, a feat that no one has come…
[I]’ve had a long, wearying couple of days these last few days. I spent a lot of my weekend doing work related to my day-job. That work continued throughout today almost without a break, and will continue some more this evening. So I was delighted and pleased when I opened the mailbox today to find…
[W]hen I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was look at my daily almanac entry that is automatically sent to Evernote each night to see the numbers that I knew would show up there today. This is what I saw: I have now written fiction for 50 consecutive days. I can’t be…