While eating breakfast before work yesterday, I watched this video. About five minutes in, there’s an interview with Peter Hook about recording Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” While mostly focused on the song, Hook talks about the times and some bits about the process behind the recording. He focuses a bit about his […]
Archives for 2021
Finding My Way
I finished, recorded, and edited a new Not About Lumberjacks story these past two weeks. (I’ve been doing a weekly writing update on the Not About Lumberjacks blog, by the way; in fact, there’s a new entry there right now…) The story I planned to release in October needs more time. So…I had a vague […]
Twelve Years…
Twelve years ago I wrote this — the first Juggling Writer entry. Since then, the blog has gone from lists and “actionable” things to reflections on being a writer with a day job. The Past Year (In Juggling Writer Time) The past year has definitely been a mix of juggling writing with a day job […]
September Silence 2021
The September Silence begins tomorrow. Each year, for all of September, I take a month-long social media break. I treat it like my writing new year — despite the heat of Texas still making summer drag into late October or early November. When September rolls around, I’m like a little kid still living up north. […]
Wanting It…
I’ve been a fan of Lilah Sturges’s writing since a friend (Mark Finn) joined a shared world fiction anthology called Clockwork Storybook in the late 90s. In a Twitter thread this morning, Lilah talked about a concept I hate: Wanting/Not Wanting something enough. And then she said something that really hit me: …maybe I don’t […]
1000 Words of Summer – 2021
The last entry, here, was about the first week of the 2021 1000 Words of Summer writing challenge. (To be fair, for some reason, calling it a challenge always seems a bit…not right. It is a challenge — you’re shooting for a daily word count. But it’s never felt like other challenges in the way […]
One Week In…
I mentioned last week that I’m taking part in the 1000 Words of Summer writing challenge. So…how did the first week go? Week One I wrote 5,315 words in the first week. (Some years I blow past daily word counts, and other years I don’t even hit 3,000.) A friend is curious about how the […]
The Backside of Backstory
There’s the backstory most of us are familiar with: characters or narrators calling back to a time prior to what’s currently happening in a story. But there are often behind-the-scenes histories and other mechanics readers never see — a different kind of backstory only the writer may know. Maybe it’s bits of considered information culled […]
Writing Challenges
I’ve never taken part in NaNoWriMo, and I don’t see a day I ever do. It’s not that I’m against it, but…it always seems I have other writing projects moving along when November rolls around. (I’m not willing to set those things aside to take on a new challenge.) Still, I think it’s cool that […]
The Annual Birthday Wish
Three days ago, my wife and I visited my mom for a little birthday celebration in my honor (today is my actual birthday). We have all come to an agreement over the years that while we are all willing to put time into preparing meals and making the day seem a bit bigger for any […]
Behind the Scenes
For some time, people have asked me why I’ve not set up a Patreon account for Not About Lumberjacks. It’s always been a simple answer: “I created Not About Lumberjacks, in part, as a place to share my short stories. I wanted agents and others to see I’m prolific and have more to offer than […]
The “Problem” with the Current Novel
I’ve thought quite a bit in recent weeks about the submission process with the latest novel. Without name dropping, some impressive agents requested partial and full copies of the manuscript. Even when they passed, they let me know they were impressed by my writing and what I was attempting to do with the story. Mentioning […]
Quitting Writing (Sort Of…)
[The short version: I’m done submitting novels to agents and publishers. The current novel seems to have run its course. Because it’s the first book of three and I want to finish the series, I will. (Many writers set a series aside at this point because you don’t get to sell a series on a […]