Most normal people wait for the end of December to roll around before deciding on New Year’s Resolutions. I, however, have never been called normal and don’t feel like waiting the six months. So here are my Half-Year’s Resolutions. Write 150,000 words of new fiction. This averages to a little under 6000 words each week. […]
Surviving the Kris Rusch Death March
I’m writing this from gate D9 at the Portland, Oregon airport, waiting for my flight back to Boston after spending over a week on the Oregon Coast. I’m tired but very excited about my writing and what the future holds. I was one of eighteen professional writers working with Kristine Kathryn Rusch (and at the […]
The Death of Dreams by Half-inches
The latest installment in Kris Rusch’s Freelancer’s Survival Guide hit me like a roundhouse left hook out of nowhere. The next thing I knew, I was staring up from the canvas, seeing stars. Kris was writing about giving up on your dreams. Among the many great insights, one in particular delivered the most powerful blow. “…sometimes (often!) the […]
A WORKshop
Some writers’ workshops are thinly disguised vacations. (I’ve avoided them.) Then there are the Workshops run by Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. They’re held out on the beautiful Oregon coast, but in most cases you don’t get much, if any, time to enjoy the pounding surf and other enticements. You’re there to work on the […]
On Hemingway and Immortality
In the end, it was just a house. I warmed up for my tour of Ernest Hemingway’s house on Key West by listening to Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto as I walked, figuring what better way to set the stage for artistic immortality than hearing Johann Sebastian at his very best. I paid my twelve dollars and […]