How Often Should I Blog? Consistently. Here’s a better question: if I want to be a novelist and not a blogger, should I bother at all?
I woke up this morning to discover that Joe Rogan apologized for yet another podcast that triggered another round of social media outrage…
I come up with a lot of excuses for not writing, which is inexcusable. My latest excuse: my 16-yr old kid came down with COVID.
Okay, not literally. The interval between seconds didn’t actually lengthen. Time didn’t tick by slower than usual. People around me didn’t speak with a drawl or move in slow motion. There were no redshifts or time dilation effects that I noticed. It wasn’t as if I was launched into space at near light speed and returned to Earth to find my husband an old man, hunched over, grasping a walking cane, and my boys with gray hair and grandchildren. Nothing like that.
I’m thrilled my latest short story “Invasion of the Alien Parasite from Interdimensional Space” is now appearing in issue 925 of BewilderingStories.com.
My short story “The Girl with No Eyes” has been published by Altered Reality Magazine. I’m so thankful my story found a home.
According to James Scott Bell in his book, Write Your Novel From The Middle: A New Approach for Plotters, Pantsers and Everyone in Between, every successful story contains what he calls a “magical midpoint moment” or “look in the mirror moment” where a single moment in the middle of the story pulls together the entire narrative… I had previously associated this “mirror moment” with fiction, and only fiction–one of the many secret ingredients in a well-crafted story that engages an audience. Now I realize it also applies to me.
I did a DuckDuckGo search for the words “when is a final draft finished novel” (I try to avoid Google) and found, at the top of the search results, a class offered by the Iowa Summer Writing Festival titled The Final Draft: On Finishing and Knowing When You’ve Finished Your Novel. In other words, the answer to this innocuous question is valuable enough to be turned into a commodity that can be exchanged in the free market for money, like pork bellies.
In the September Pub Rants blog post from Nelson Literary Agency, “9 Story Openings to Avoid, Part 4,” they posed a fun challenge to craft a brief opening scene from these six lines of dialogue…