At the last writer’s group we got another assignment, but several people had to leave early and there wasn’t time to finish it, so we essentially got the challenge with a week to finish. So what would have been a piece of flash fiction grew into a 3300 word story that I wrote yesterday. I may want to do something else with this one, once I get the tweaks tweaked and the bugs debugged. Working title is “Have a Good Day,” with a nod to Jerome Bixby. If you don’t get the reference, clearly you haven’t watched enough of the old Twilight Zone tv series. You’re also probably an infant. Continue reading
Category Archives: Writing
Another Such Weekend and I Am Undone
- Bill Eakin at Yuletide Souls Fest
My social and business calendars were pretty much filled this weekend, though on Saturday it was hard to tell where business ended and social began, since it was such a mixture of both. My primary event on Saturday was the Yuletide Souls Fest at the Vicksburg Public Library. Besides the locals, William R.(Bill) Eakin had come down from Arkansas. He’s the author of Redgunk Tales and another frequent contributor to Realms of Fantasy. I hadn’t seen Bill in years and we had to mourn a bit together for magazines past. Continue reading
Muse and Writer Dialogues #3
FADE IN
A room that passes for an office. There are bookshelves on one wall, a motley assortment of carvings, signed storyboards, and framed magazine covers on the free wall space. On the far wall is a medieval-style heraldic display of a cockatrice with a motto in bad Latin that reads “Pullus non Est.” Horizontal files sit beneath the window , and on top of those a free-standing rack holds three Japanese swords. The computer desk is on the wall nearest the door, facing away from the window. Beside that is a printer on a stand. In the base of that is a PS3 and an Xbox on a lower shelf. Neither is in use.
Enter the WRITER, who finds the MUSE sitting in a rocking chair staring at what looks like a smartphone. He’s a slob. She looks like a statuesque Greek goddess most of the time, but her appearance keeps changing.
WRITER: What are you doing?
MUSE: What does it look like? I’m playing “Angry Birds.” Not that you care. What do you want?
WRITER: You have to ask, after that stunt you pulled?
Beach Bum and the Drowned Girl
This was a little quick. I got the notion yesterday, wrote the first half. Finished the second half today, since it was only about 1100 words in rough. Now I have to rewrite it so that what’s on the page has a passing relation to the vision in my fevered brain. You know, the usual.
I hear there are writers who get it right the first time. Like other things I’ve heard of, such as a black hole, or extra-solar planet. I’m sure they exist, but I’ve never met one.
Ringing the Changes
I was checking some articles on my old web site and was struck by how, well, for want of a better word, useless some older posts on the business of writing were. I mean, take the one on manuscript preparation, for example. Perfectly good advice…for 1997. Back when most venues were still paper-only and email was only good for querying, and not always then. Now it’s email attachments or online submission forms in all cases except a handful, though when I first started submitting the publishers were fighting those kind of changes tooth and nail and more teeth. That was then, and not everyone could wrap their heads around the notion that the way it was didn’t necessarily reflect the way it would be. Continue reading
