Slacking For Self-Care
It's not been a great month for writing time, between sickness and a big update at the day job. So this one is going up late, and things aren't looking good for a triumphant NaNoWriMo.
The term self-care gets stuffed with a lot of connotations of middle-aged rich people in spas with eucalyptus oil, cucumbers on the . . .
Just Keep Typing
National Novel Writing Month is a challenge every year where people try to pen a novel in just thirty days. I managed to finish mine last year at like 4 AM on December 1st; I rounded it up to mission accomplished.
I dug out an old idea of mine that had been sitting in a notebook and am setting out today to get . . .
Book Review - Red Rising By Pierce Brown
I found out about Pierce Brown through the MacStories guys. So I wasn't really sure what I was getting into beyond the basic gist of the book. When I first started reading, I found myself in that familiar YA territory. A well-worn mix of heavy-handed metaphors, large dumps of exposition, and very understandable rules and factions. I . . .
Creativity and Planning
My Hobonichi notebook has become a place to do a quick bit of writing every day. I write a page or so with text of varying sizes depending on my motivation. I pair that with an actual attempt to document my day in Day One. These routines are meant to keep me writing even when I don’t get a lot of time to do anything . . .
Book Review: Fall; or Dodge, In Hell By Neal Stephenson
Friday went a little sideways on time, and I found that it was already almost midnight by the time I got a few minutes to upload this post. Decided that it made a little more sense to wait until Monday.
I have to admire that Neal Stephenson has created an entire science fiction world to serve as framing stories for fantasy novels . . .
Becoming Off-The-Rack
I had long thought the prime era of off-the-rack identities was the 90’s: where which block of videos you watched on MTV came with a requisite mall store that sold the right clothes to go with your CD collection.
My old idea was that pop’s great flattening in the digital era mashed pop together into a miasma of . . .
Book Review - Cemetery Beach
Warren Ellis pitched Cemetery Beach as an all-out action story as a pallet cleanser after he and Jason Howard’s earlier series Trees. (A title I enjoyed that is supposed to be coming back shortly.) Cemetery Beach delivers on that promise. Structures like a dungeon crawl through an alien world, there aren't a lot of info-dumps in Ellis’ . . .