• This weekend and next

    24 Jun 2011 » 1 min read about Personal & Family

    As summer has officially started and the days are getting shorter (here in the Northern hemisphere, anyway) I find that I am growing busier. Summer is typically crunch time at the day job. But we are also now about 2 months away from our little girl being born and things outside of work are busy,…

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  • Using Scrivener with writing critique groups

    24 Jun 2011 » 5 min read about Writing & Publishing

    I belong to a few writing critique groups and find them to be incredibly valuable. In fact, I’d wish I’d joined some of these groups before I sold a story. It might have taken me less than 14 years to make that first sale. On the chance that you’ve never been involved in a critique…

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  • An open discussion on blog stats

    23 Jun 2011 » 7 min read about Blog & Site Meta

    Last year, I made it one of my goals to triple the average daily traffic on my blog. I had a pretty good set of objectives for achieving this. By the end of 2011, I wanted to be averaging three times as many views as I was at the end of 2011. What I didn’t…

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  • Help with some great SF novel openings?

    22 Jun 2011 » 1 min read

    Tonight, at the Arlington Writers Group, we are doing an exercise on “beginnings”. The idea is for each person to read the opening page or so of a novel and then the group will discuss why it does or does not work. Being a science fiction writer, I am wont to choose a good science…

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  • NPR: The best 100 science fiction & fantasy books

    22 Jun 2011 » 1 min read about Reading & Books

    NPR is asking people to vote for the best 100 science fiction & fantasy books ever written. SF&F people are encouraging everyone to go and vote; we are trying to top the 17,000 votes that thrillers got last year. I just finished posting my top 5. And just so that you don’t have to drill…

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  • Blog on IDrive: Cloud backups and peace of mind

    22 Jun 2011 » 5 min read about reviews

    I have been using IDrive since the fall of 2009 as a means for securely backing up all of my data, and while I’ve posted about it before, I’ve never really done so in detail. But it is worth blogging about because it is, in my mind, the perfect solution for data backups*. When people…

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  • “Hindsight, In Neon” over at BestScienceFictionStories

    22 Jun 2011 » 1 min read about Writing & Publishing

    The folks over at BestScienceFictionStories.com have posted a summary and some thoughts on my story, “Hindsight, In Neon”. This story originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Apex Magazine. It was later reprinted in the Apex anthology, Descended From Darkness, Vol 1.

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  • Feed your writer’s block

    21 Jun 2011 » 3 min read about GPS, Technology & Gadgets, Writing & Publishing

    From time-to-time, I get into a rut where it seems like nothing I write is any good. This can be self-propagating. You write more and it feels worse, so you write even more and that seems even worse. In reality, it isn’t. When this happens to me, however, writing doesn’t seems as fun as it…

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  • Tumblr

    21 Jun 2011 » 1 min read about social networking

    In an effort to expand my social network, I am now relaying my blog posts to my¬†Tumblr site. I’m not exactly sold on Tumblr as an interface for blogging, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a presence there. For now, all the posts from this blog are automatically relayed there, just as they…

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  • Humor for a Tuesday morning

    21 Jun 2011 » 1 min read about Personal & Family

    Tuesdays seem like they are neglected, so I decided to post something funny in honor of the fact that it is Tuesday. (And in truth, seeing my high school class group revived on Facebook spurred the idea.) So without further delay, here is a picture of yours truly, taken in either the fall of 1989…

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