Archive for the 'About Writing' Category
I’ve had the same question three times in three days
“How do you write books and do your job?”
The answer is not anything real hard to figure out. I can write 750 words (three manuscript pages) in one to two hours if I have any energy at all. 750 words a day adds up - I started the book I’m working on 10 [...]
Back in the Hunt
July was all short stories and trips to sandy beaches and on late trains. Weddings and anniversaries and anthology stories (a favorite of mine - I like writing to themes). So now it’s finally looking like August will be writing my next novel. Or starting, anyway. At first I chafed at the [...]
A few story sales
Story sales come from keeping things in the mail, and from following up, and hopefully also from anthology invites. I haven’t been doing very well at keeping things in the mail the last year or so, and then a fit of good behavior came over me and I mailed out everything. The universe [...]
Harry Potter: Ramblings
Just finished the last Harry Potter book. Very well done. Fabulous. Bittersweet sad to be at the end of a story you’ve loved for years.
I finished it in about 24 hours (including the minor distractions of work and sleep), but before I got my hands on it, I had some [...]
Review: Chip Delaney Reading at SFM Tonight
Part of my writing process is to hear from other writers. So tonight I went to listen to Chip (Samuel R.) Delaney at the SFM. Listening gave me a number of good reminders:
Be Brave: Chip is a reminder to be brave. To not care if you are submitting experimental writing. To [...]
The Page 99 Test
The Page 99 test suggests that if you open a book there and read, you get a good sense for the quality of the whole book. I got asked to do a blog entry for The Page 99 Test about The Silver Ship and the Sea. It was actually kind of fun to [...]
Back from Hawaii
I can’t decide if it’s a writer’s paradise or not. I think I’d get bored if I lived there; we were getting bored after a week and a half. Although I must say that to a girl that grew up in California, a warm ocean was pretty close to the best thing in [...]
Off to Hawaii
We fly away tomorrow for a family trip and to watch my son get married. Maybe I’ll get a chance to post a few good pictures. In the meantime, I have made the last few Clarion West parties, and the crop of students this year seems quite bright. The parties are also [...]
That post-book thing….
Put the second draft of MAYAN DECEMBER in the mail yesterday. The first draft wrote itself, but the second one took a while.
I’ve been out and about doing readings for THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA. Well, when you read your prose out loud, it sounds different than it does than when you [...]
In which I interview Kim Stanley Robinson
…and the article is now posted at Futurist.com.
Interviewing is fun - I did quite a lot of it for a little while, and then got busy doing other stuff. I learned a little bit this time, too. I sat down at Norwescon with Ken Schole’s wife, Jen, and picked her brain a little. [...]




