OMG My Parents Will Be Here Next Week

OMG My Parents Will Be Here Next Week

Wedding stuff is starting to eat into my goals and such.  That said, I’m still going to be posting status reports on my goals semi-regularly.  This is inspired by Wil Wheaton’s blog, where he has some specific things he is grading himself on monthly. Blogging publicly about it makes him accountable, and it works as a motivation tool. I’m not doing the letter grade thing yet, just mostly accounting where I’m at with certain daily or weekly goals. Goals status:…

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Stir fry

Stir fry

Busy day. Word count achieved, spent too much time on Twitter, and I finally saw hidden figures! And now I’m throwing together ‘what’s still in the fridge at the end of the week’ stir fry.

Author Marketing And Other Nonsense

Author Marketing And Other Nonsense

Almost missed my post for the day. It’s 6pm here. There’s been a lot going on. Speculations 002 is out today, which you should check out and subscribe to. This issue features me rambling about quantum entanglement. After finishing and publishing the newsletter, today was mostly about wedding stuff that needed to be taken care of. The mountain of craft supplies for decorations continues to grow, and finding a photographer is proving to be something of a challenge. I am completely in favor…

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Things That Make Me Happy

Things That Make Me Happy

A quick post this morning before I dive into a busy day. Here’s a list of things I’m happy about: We bought tickets to see John Wick: Chapter 2 on opening weekend. Warren Ellis has written the first season of Castlevania for Netflix. I finally ordered my “wedding dress”, it is ridiculous, and old women are going to be so confused. Marketing efforts on Twitter are starting to show results, which I’ll blog about some time in March. We finally…

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Character Development in Zeroes by Chuck Wendig

Character Development in Zeroes by Chuck Wendig

As I’m going through this DIY MFA process and inhaling as many books as possible, I’ve started watching for good examples of technique. I just finished Chuck Wendig’s cyberpunk adventure, Zeroes, and discovered a fantastic example of building characters that readers care about. In some ways, Zeroes is a straight forward Scoobie-gang adventure, but with hackers. It’s such a good read because you end up really caring about the members of said Scoobie gang. That means I want to pick the…

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Cyber crime, author marketing, and space operas

Cyber crime, author marketing, and space operas

Last night I started reading Chuck Wendig’s cybercrime novel, Zeroes. So far, it’s a lot of fun.  But fun is typically what I expect from Chuck. Zeroes has me thinking about other ways to assemble different characters. This one has a team that has to be assembled by a common thread, here in the form of a government agent.  I may have figured out why the beginning of my scientists vs. kaiju story just didn’t work. Reading fiction for fun…

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Friday and Other Good Things

Friday and Other Good Things

Happy Friday, everyone! The first issue of Speculations is live! You can view the newsletter archive here, and use the form in the sidebar on this page to subscribe. This issue includes the cutest tiny crabs in the world. The other day I started brainstorming a short story, trying to come up with a fun scifi or fantasy setting to channel my general state of grumpiness about the wedding. That evolved into a piece of ancient history in my science fiction…

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