This was a tough writing week for me. I felt like I was trying to squeeze water from a stone. For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a pivotal scene in which I know what I […]

I’m perhaps halfway through a first draft of the novel. That is (currently) about 79,000 words. Fifteen chapters have been completed at the draft level. Other chapters have sketches or outlines, while some are merely a virtual index […]

A symbolic milestone for me this week: passing 70,000 words in my draft. I’ve been writing more in the last two months because I have given myself permission to write for longer than an hour each day (which […]

Writing workshops inspire me and fill me with new ways of thinking. They also leave me with a lot of critique comments to wrestle with. For the novel WIP, I often put comments in a file for later, […]

This week I wrote almost 1000 words on the novel draft! I’m expanding a scene that I had only included as a one-paragraph flashback. I received feedback from a couple of people that this could be its own […]

My writing this week consisted mostly of negative writing in the sense that I took words out of the WIP. That seems to be how it goes. Why? Sometimes I tell the reader too much about characters’ thoughts […]

I pushed myself this week to finish a scene so that a chapter would be more or less complete (first draft, that is). Even though I was busy with unpacking and starting a new writing class (Advanced Speculative […]

Amid moving madness, I stuck to my writing practice. This week six and a half hours were spent on writing with additional time spent researching and reviewing a couple of short stories for other people. A lot of […]

Comments land like a stone in a pond: they ripple through the work. Last weekend I had critique sessions with writing buddies. This week I followed those ripples and made minor changes in a couple of chapters. I […]