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2023 Awards Eligibility
Hello, and welcome to 2024! As it says on the tin, this is an awards eligibility post. I published four original short stories in 2023, all of which are eligible for the various awards in the short fiction category! If people only read one of my stories, I would be most pleased if it’s “The…
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A letter to my former self circa March 2004
Dear Former Self Circa March 2004, I suppose it’s most common to write these sorts of things at five- or ten-year intervals. The whole “humans have five fingers on each hand, making multiples of five and ten natural points at which to parse out our world” thing. But I couldn’t have written you this letter…
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Why I write spec fic: A (partial) manifesto
(Edit: I’d scheduled this post to go live on Wednesday the 4th, but somehow WordPress missed posting it, and I didn’t realize till now.) In my senior seminar at college nearly ten years ago, we had an audit participate in the course. If you are clairvoyant (see what I did there with the spec fic…
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The Emotional Journey of Writing: A Line Graph
(Click anywhere on the image to enlarge.)
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Work world aphorism: “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.”
I’m back home from the Colorado Gold Conference. Or rather, now that I am home, I will not have to drive out to southeast Denver for anymore workshops or speakers. Because I’m cheap and did not get a hotel room. Maybe next year. I digress.* In any case, one thing that stuck me during the…
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3 things I love about writing, with footnotes
Writing is work, and writing is hard, and therefore, despite those who believe that writing is this lovely thing that happens magically when fairies sneeze or angels blink, or as the result of some other event that requires no effort whatsoever (these people tend to not be writers themselves), I sometimes need to remind myself of what I like…
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Writing as a third world problem
A couple of weeks ago, my then-two-month-old laptop died a rather anticlimatic death. I attempted to boot it up, only to have it try to boot from a media device that didn’t exist on the machine. Huh, thought I, I guess this might explain those messages I was getting about Windows shutting down unexpectedly, even…
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Alas, poor NaNoWriMo! I knew him, Chris Baty.
First off, the post title is a poor allusion for the following reasons: 1. NaNoWriMo is far from dead. 2. NaNoWriMo isn’t human, although many humans are involved with it. It’s closer to the Borg than a single human, except for the whole group-think-annihilate-humans thing.* 3. Because NaNoWriMo isn’t human, there is no skull for…
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Torn allegiances
Some might consider it counterproductive for my first real post (I don’t count my last one) to contain a confession that I haven’t been writing for the past, hmm, eight months or so when my site is ostensibly devoted to promoting my writing career. What can I say? I live dangerously. As dangerously as one…