I finished something!

After thrashing all week with the story I have been fighting with all last year, I finally set out to write something new last night. Wouldn’t want to flub my resolution in the very first week now, would I? It still took me a while to settle in and face up to the prospect of […]

Looking back on 2010

My overall writing goal for 2010 was to get better at finishing things. And yet somehow, I didn’t quite say so when posted my goals here. Instead I listed the stories I wanted to finish. Of those, I finished and sold(!) the “Evolutionary Just-So” story, the story with “something wonderful hidden in it” held on […]

So how’s that deadline thingy working out for you?

PHLPLPLPLPLPLPLHFFFT!

Re: The Voyage of the Beagle

It took the Beagle five years to sail around the world, and it only took me just over one year for me to get through Darwin’s book about it, The Voyage of the Beagle. It’s basically a travelogue with forays inland to describe the various geologies and curious animals, in short the 19th century equivalent […]

I guess that’s one down

Today is the first deadline I set myself, so today I declare my evolutionary Just-So story done. Even though it’s a bit of foolishness written for my inner six-year-old, it’s been absurdly hard for me to let go of it. So be it. It’s as done as it’s going to get. Go find your own […]

Deadlines

When I set my writing goals for this year, I thought finishing six drafts in a year wouldn’t be that hard for me. Even when I turned up a seventh draft I wanted to finish, it still seemed doable. Now it’s March, I’m starting to notice that I’m haven’t finished any of them.

Looking forward

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions. I’m always making plans for what I want to do and resolving to do better next week. But it’s a good time to consider my writing goals for the year. Which are:

My rewriting wresolutions

One of the up sides of going to Boskone is just hanging out with fellow writers. One of the down sides is repeatedly being confronted with my difficulties in letting go of the stories I’m working on. There’s the pen story, in which a merchant’s daughter discovers that the pen she borrowed is a lot […]

Time to read Darwin

2009 is Darwin Year, among other things, because it’s 150 years since On The Origin of Species was published. I’m a little late mentioning this, because the commemoration really started last July, on the anniversary of the day Darwin felt pressed to lay claim to natural selection. So one of my resolutions for this year […]