I used to be in a writing group with two good friends. One evening, we let another friend — someone who doesn’t write fiction — sit in. He was impressed by the effort my friends and I put into the stories we wrote. It wasn’t our friends’ intent, but he said something about how he […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]