Tweet Last week I left you hanging with the promise of a sad story and some detailed sales analysis. I know you’ve just been waiting on the edge of your seat ever since. Well…I’m more than a week late with the follow-up, but it kind of works out. Because I’m late, I can share all […]
If you’ve been paying attention, dear inklings (and I know you have, because that’s just the sort of darling, attentive things you are), you already know that I harbor a love for all things sci-fi, and that this love includes a deep fondness for Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy….
Tweet What I learned about writing this week from facepainting for Fancy Faces at the Oklahoma State Fair is that facepainting is a fun, creative, interesting, and challenging job that makes me want to come home and curl up on the couch in blessed unconsciousness for twelve hours. I have also learned that composing coherent, […]
Tweet I just realized I haven’t been talking about Taming Fire much recently. Well…not here. I can already hear Courtney and Joshua guffawing that I even dared to say that, because I talk about almost nothing else in real life. But somehow it hasn’t shown up much on the blog. That’s pretty odd. I’m going […]
Tweet I started the week talking about my short story class, and some of the challenges that come with providing feedback to our peers. The worst of it was talking about a sex scene buried in one of the many stories we’ve read so far. And, mostly, it was a whole lot of worrying over […]
Tweet No, not Conan O’Brien. We’re talking somebody a bit less civilized than that (although, I suppose that some of you might find this debatable). Today, my dear inklings, we’re talking Conan the Barbarian, who is brought to you by the letter J. Why the letter J? Because if my friend and fellow writer Josh […]
Tweet I’m taking a short story class out at OU this fall. It’s the one I mentioned in the English department, where the professor claimed fantasy and science fiction stories don’t feature complex, compelling characters. Bah. That still makes me angry. I’m going to get myself in trouble in that class if I’m not careful. […]
Tweet It looks just like a rose. Smoky shadows sharp contrast within the blooms, Lines of black buried in rosy red, Skin-soft swells that curl upward, inward, then blossom out again. It sounds like summer thunder. One stark, still-shattering strum. It tastes like ash, bitter black, and smells like panicked fear. It feels like winter’s […]
Tweet On Tuesday I wrote a little story about getting my mouth washed out with soap for singing some dirty words. I like that story. It characterizes me pretty clearly in a short scene or two. It also shows the inefficacy of corporal punishment (at least of the soap-based variety), because I’ve grown up to […]
Being sick resets one’s brain to the basics. In three brief points, lets discuss some basics of good writing. We’ll look at story structure, rules for writing, and audience analysis.
