have been struggling along with the first draft of this novel since late March. I had hoped to have the draft finished by the end of June, but it had been a difficult story to write. With short stories, I push through the first draft without looking back. With novels–for which I have far less experience–I…
am delighted to announce that Issue #45 of InterGalactic Medicine Show is out today, and that my story “Gemma Barrows Comes to Cooperstown” is the cover story for this issue. This is the first time any story of mine has been the cover story. What’s more, the amazing cover art for this issue was done by…
e spent the long Memorial Day weekend up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with my sister and her family, and my mom. The kids got to spend most of the time at Dutch Wonderland, and we spent the weekend trying to keep up with them. We also took a horse and buggy ride through an Amish farm,…
ith the contracts signed, I am delighted to announce that my newest story, “Gemma Barrows Comes to Cooperstown” will be appearing in an upcoming issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show. This is my second baseball science fiction story to appear in the magazine, and still the baseball stories are not out of my system yet. I’m not…
y friend, and fellow science fiction writer, Bud Sparhawk has some fighting words for me this morning. For context, before continuing, you should go read his post. Bud and I have given several talks on online writing tools, and pantsing vs. plotting at various science fiction conventions. Today, however, Bud made it clear that he…
t’s been a while since I’ve given an update on the progress of the current novel draft that I am working on. For a refresher, recall that I am trying to write 4 novel drafts between March 2015 and March 2016 (a first and second draft for 2 different novels). I struggled for a while…
have had some reports of DocsList errors from folks using the Google Docs Writing Tracker. This is because those functions have been deprecated. Several months ago, I updated the master branch with code that uses the newer DriveApp object model. I have been using that code for a few months with no errors. If you…
recently pushed a new branch called “project-tracking” out to the Google Docs Writing Tracker on GitHub. This branch includes code for project-tracking that I wrote about a week ago. The changes have been working fine for me over the last 10 days or so. The one thing I haven’t done yet is update the template spreadsheet.…
A Tale of Two Stories ast week, while on one of my daily walks, I suddenly hit on why I was struggling with the novella on which I’ve been working, off and on, for the last year or so. The current working title is “Strays.” I was artificially constraining the story. I was making a…
wasn’t going to make a big deal about hitting 600 consecutive days of writing–which I will hit later today when I get my writing in. I’d promised that my next major milestone would come on August 23, 2015–that’s when I’ll hit 763 consecutive days. On that day, I will have more consecutive days of writing than…
tories like Stephen King’s “A Death” in the March 9 issue of the New Yorker go a long way to explaining why I love short fiction. I have this sense–perhaps a false one–that while there is no such thing as the perfect novel, there is a perfect short story. It is as rare as a perfect game in…
t crept up on my, but I awoke this morning with a feeling that the date, February 27, was vaguely familiar. I couldn’t quite place at, not at first, and then around mid-morning, it hit me. It was 2 years ago today that I began my efforts to write every day. It was also 2…