Archive for the 'About Writing' Category
Fire and Water…Musings on Climate and Governance
This post is a lightly-edited version of one that went out in my newsletter. If you like it, please consider signing up. I send out about ten newsletters a year. They include posts like this, reading recommendations, and sometimes some of my writing. My son just came home from fighting wildfires in Washington State. The […]
Reading Recommendation: Overstory, by Richard Powers
Every once in a while, a book’s ideas and presentation will wake me from sound sleep and make me fumble out of bed and grab coffee at an odd hour. This does not happen often anymore; as a writer I am often ever-so-slightly distanced by being able to see the bones of a book. But […]
A Year Without a Winter
I’m really excited to share some news. If you read my newsletter, you heard this story. If you don’t, and you want new stories about once a month, you can sign up here. Here’s my news…..I finished my first-ever work as a fiction editor. This project, the anthology A Year Without a Winter, was full […]
KEEPERS — A book by the numbers
So the first draft of Keepers (the sequel to Wilders) is turned in! I track my time, and it took 255 hours to get the book to this point. The first entry was in February. So that’s 9 months, at roughly 28 hours a month, although in reality there were three big pushes and much […]
My Stonecoast MFA
I recently completed a Masters in Fine Arts at Stonecoast. A number of people asked me why, and others have whether or not it was worth it. So here’s my write-up, which might help mid-career authors who are considering an MFA. First – a brief description. Stonecoast is a low-residency MFA through the University of […]
The Importance of Science to SF
I am writing this from a coffee shop in DC. One of the reasons I came here at this time was to participate in the March for Science right here in the capital. The March I ran into three friends, fellow writer Brenda Clough and her husband Larry Clough, and another fellow writer, Chris Cevasco. What a […]
Wilders: Mentioned in PW, First Draft in!
News on my next Pyr book — Wilders! My editor, Rene Sears, mentioned Wilders in a PW article on post-apocalyptic fiction. I can’t link to the article since it’s behind a paywall, but here’s what Rene said in the article: “The fear of climate-related disaster, particularly disaster in which humankind has played a terrible role, is prevalent right […]
Post #4: On the Rising Part of the Curve
I’ve already told a few stories about POST – how I finally got use Cynthia Radthorne’s art, how the story started, and how it’s partly a conversation with another author’s work. I’m telling these stories because eSpecBooks is currently crowdfunding POST and another novel by Jack Campbell (The Sister Paradox) on Kickstarter. More about that […]
Post #2: A novel that started with zen gardens
This is tale #2 related to Post, which is being Kickstarted (along with The Sister Paradox, by Jack Campbell) by eSpec Books. For those following along at home, just as I’m getting ready to publish this, the Kisktarter is two days in, and it’s reached $1135 dollars, or about a third of what it needs to fund. […]
POST #1. POST! Really…my novel Post is now on Kickstarter!
I’m pleased to announce that eSpec Books is publishing my novel POST via Kickstarter. I wrote POST some time (pre-MFA) and I’m pleased to have it see a bright, shiny daylight right alongside a Jack Campbell novel. I’ll talk about it here every few days to tell the story of how the book started, how it got picked up […]
