This has been running through my mind lately. Pretty hard to shake, so I'll share it with you.
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Help keep the words flowing.
||| Comments are welcome |||
Help keep the words flowing.
Everything falls apart
Since May of last year, I've been pulled hard in a half-dozen different directions. Something had to give, and Landless was it. I never declared an official hiatus, but blog posts have trickled down to nothing. I stopped writing limericks for Three Word Wednesday and I finally was forced to stop writing Friday Flash stories.
I'd guess that barely a dozen people noticed this change, and even fewer commented on it. That should tell me something about the significance of this space to other people. I'm still not sure what it says about the significance of this space to me.
Things are mostly unchanged with respect to the demands put on my time and attention. I'd hoped that this would have gotten better by now, but it hasn't. Maybe things will get better in a month or two, maybe not. In the meantime, blog posts like this will be like the irregular mugfuls of water guiltily poured onto half-dead, half-forgotten houseplants, kept alive more out of habit than out of love.
||| Comments are welcome |||
Help keep the words flowing.
I'd guess that barely a dozen people noticed this change, and even fewer commented on it. That should tell me something about the significance of this space to other people. I'm still not sure what it says about the significance of this space to me.
Things are mostly unchanged with respect to the demands put on my time and attention. I'd hoped that this would have gotten better by now, but it hasn't. Maybe things will get better in a month or two, maybe not. In the meantime, blog posts like this will be like the irregular mugfuls of water guiltily poured onto half-dead, half-forgotten houseplants, kept alive more out of habit than out of love.
||| Comments are welcome |||
Help keep the words flowing.
More on the Hugo award
Yesterday, I noted that the science fiction novel I wrote and published last year is eligible to win the Hugo. There's really no need to note that being eligible to win the Hugo for Best Novel doesn't mean the book has any meaningful chance of winning, or even of being nominated, but I include the observation for those of you who might start to think I'd gone even more delusional than my everyday standard.
So if this is hopeless and I have zero chance (or, to be precise, an infinitesimally non-zero chance), why bother to mention it?
Because I wrote and published a pretty good, Hugo-eligible novel, and that's worth commemorating. I'd like to have more reviews, but those that I have gotten have been good. No one has trashed it, either because of the writing or because the concept of a hero with grammar-and punctuation-based superpowers is too goofy. Sales have been slow, but they too are non-zero.
There are plenty of times that despair rises up high when I look at how I've fallen short of what I want to achieve as a writer. It's useful to remind myself that I wrote and published a pretty good, Hugo-eligible novel, a milestone in this tortured, meandering journey I'm on.
And the next book will be even better.
||| Comments are welcome |||
Help keep the words flowing.
So if this is hopeless and I have zero chance (or, to be precise, an infinitesimally non-zero chance), why bother to mention it?
Because I wrote and published a pretty good, Hugo-eligible novel, and that's worth commemorating. I'd like to have more reviews, but those that I have gotten have been good. No one has trashed it, either because of the writing or because the concept of a hero with grammar-and punctuation-based superpowers is too goofy. Sales have been slow, but they too are non-zero.
There are plenty of times that despair rises up high when I look at how I've fallen short of what I want to achieve as a writer. It's useful to remind myself that I wrote and published a pretty good, Hugo-eligible novel, a milestone in this tortured, meandering journey I'm on.
And the next book will be even better.
||| Comments are welcome |||
Help keep the words flowing.
My Hugo-eligible novel
As it happens, this is the first year I have an eligible work available for nomination for the Hugo Award, in the "Best Novel" category. As the attentive reader will have no doubt already surmised, the book is "Verbosity's Vengeance", published in September 2013.Anyone attending LONCON 3 (and therefore allowed to nominate) who feels that "Verbosity's Vengeance" is worth the attention, please feel free to throw it into the velociraptor pit. Instructions for nomination are here.
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Resolutions for 2014
As I said last year (i.e. yesterday), New Year's Resolutions are a good way to set specific, actionable goals. Nebulous goals like "get in shape" or "write more" are harder to work toward. Specific goals give you concrete benchmarks. Here are my resolutions for 2014:
1. Run a 5K. This will be part of a general effort to lose some weight, exercise more, and generally rage against the dying of the light that seems to be wrapping itself around my middle-aged body.
2. Publish my next book. This WIP is now at the completed first draft stage, so it will need to be revised (multiple times), polished, beta read, edited & formatted.
3. Write the first draft of Book #3. Part of it is already written, so I need to finish the first draft. Anything after that will be gravy.
Check back with me in 12 months to see how I did on these.
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Help keep the words flowing.
1. Run a 5K. This will be part of a general effort to lose some weight, exercise more, and generally rage against the dying of the light that seems to be wrapping itself around my middle-aged body.
2. Publish my next book. This WIP is now at the completed first draft stage, so it will need to be revised (multiple times), polished, beta read, edited & formatted.
3. Write the first draft of Book #3. Part of it is already written, so I need to finish the first draft. Anything after that will be gravy.
Check back with me in 12 months to see how I did on these.
||| Comments are welcome |||
Help keep the words flowing.