Author Jay Lake has some excellent advice for my writing friends. OK, it’s also applicable to my writing enemies, in addition to those writers who maintain neutrality toward me.
Fortunately, I heard the advice to start at the top very early in my writing career, so I did.
The first of what I hope will be many InterGalactic Medicine Show anthologies is came out today. I picked up a copy at my local Borders.
Here’s the table of contents:
Each of the short stories has an afterword by the author, telling a little about how the story came to be written.
The discerning reader will have noticed that a certain three-named author has more than one story in there. That’s right: I’m flattered that two of my stories were selected for the anthology.
Scott M. Roberts, who is also in the anthology, wrote a poem in honor of the occasion of the anthology’s release. Scott was at Orson Scott Card’s workshop with me, and then he won Writers of the Future the same year I did, so he went to that workshop with me and was published in that anthology with me, too. Quit following me around, Scott!
Ad the Odyssey workshop last year, I wrote what I said was a "…short story that I consider one of my best." After revising based on critiques at Odyssey and from my local writing groups, I decided it was my best short story (so far).
I sold it to InterGalactic Medicine Show today. It may appear before the end of the year.
I have a new nephew. He came a little earlier than expected, but we’re glad he’s here nonetheless.
James Maxey wrote the first book I reviewed on my blog. He’s also one of my favorite writers of short fiction (despite the fact that if he’s participating in a Codex contest, I have no chance of winning.) I highly recommend his stories "To Know All Things That Are in the Earth" and "Silent as Dust," available at Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show.
Last year, his second novel, Bitterwood, came out. In this post last year, I mentioned in passing that it was a great novel, but I never gave it a full review. And I’m not going to now — I’ll just sum up. Basic premise: to avenge his family, Bant Bitterwood uses his uncannily accurate archery to kill dragons. After he kills the heir to the dragon throne, the dragon king comes up with a plan to exterminate humans. The dragon wizard Vendevorex and his human apprentice Jandra have to stop him.
You can read a short story prequel online, "Tornado of Sparks," to get a taste of the world Maxey has created.
Bitterwood also has one of the coolest book covers I’ve seen:
The first draft of Unforgettable is done. I already know a bunch of things I need to add or change, but the story arc is complete.
I wrote the first words of this novel on January 1, but at that point I didn’t know it was going to be a novel. It was just a character sketch.
On May 13, I started the push to finish the novel by WorldCon. Since May 15, I wrote at least 500 words every day. My average daily word count (since the push) was 835. My biggest day was May 26: 2073 words.
There were some long periods during which I absolutely had to force myself to write. If not for the Codex Novel Contest, I probably would have skipped a day during that time, and then one day would have become two, then three, then more. What kept me going was badges I could earn in the contest. (Yes, I do need stinkin’ badges.)
So, what’s next? I’ll set the novel aside for a few days and focus on a short story. Then I’ll go back and add a few missing scenes from early in the novel.
I just finished the climax of Unforgettable. It’s a little talky, but I think it works.
I should be able to wrap up the first draft this weekend.
After losing about 500 words of my novel due to a complicated situation involving FTP backups, I began looking for a different way to have an offsite backup of my important files.
I have a portable hard drive in a safe deposit box at my bank, but that’s a rather awkward way of maintaining a backup.
An insurance agent who was training me on how to run an office introduced me to Carbonite. After you install Carbonite on your computer, it automatically backs up your important files to Carbonite’s servers. It takes a while for the initial backup (about 18 days in my case), but once that’s done it only has to backup your new or changed files, which it usually does within minutes after you save them.
That means in the case of a catastrophe, such as a fire, which destroyed my computer, all my writing, all my photos and scanned documents, and all my music files could be restored.
Carbonite costs $49.95 per year for unlimited storage, and I think my peace of mind is worth it. You can check it out here.
The reason I’m blogging this now is that my brother Michael asked about it, since he just had a computer catastrophe. (Hopefully it’s just the motherboard on his computer, so his data may still be safe on his hard drive.)
I just passed 60,000 words in my novel. My protagonist has just defeated the bad guy and thinks the climax is over, but he’s wrong — the real climax is just about to start.
I’m guessing there are only about 3000 words left in this draft, unless people start monologuing.
I’m one of this month’s featured authors at AnthologyBuilder.com. That means you get a $1 discount if you order an anthology containing one of my stories. (Or if it contains a story by one of the other featured authors, if you’re sick and tired of reading my stories.) You can get one of the pre-built anthologies or — and this is the cool thing about AnthologyBuilder — build your own out of the hundreds of stories by over a hundred different authors.
