Pantsing

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Yesterday I was talking about the new military SF novel. I should have mentioned that I am experimenting with a new writing method. That may explain why it has been so much fun. Normally I am an outliner. The corpses of unfinished novels littered my early career. I started off on short stories, and in those days I always found them easy to write. I could hold the whole idea in my mind, write the first draft in a few days and move on to the next project. Things fell to pieces when I tried to apply the same technique Read more…

Sweet Sixteen

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So yesterday I hit 16 posts this month, precisely twice as many as I managed in all of last year. I’m going to give myself a hearty pat on the back for that. I’ll also confess I am a bit stuck for something to write about today so I am just going to talk about recent developments in my writing and travel plans. Bear with me, I am new to this daily blogging thing. I was very surprised to discover my military SF novel seems to have taken on a life of its own. I sat down to write a Read more…

Surface Pro 3 Revisited

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It’s a bit of an experiment today. I am posting this using the Open Source version of Microsoft’s now unsupported but much loved Windows Live Writer. This is an experimental version but  it seems stable so I’m going to give it a try. The other part of the experiment is that I’m going to look back at a product I have already reviewed and see how I feel about it after putting it to use over a fair length of time. In late 2014 I bought a Surface Pro 3. It was the basic model with an i3 processor, 4 Read more…

The Limits of Outlining

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I tend to be an outliner but these have their limits as I discovered when working on the latest Kormak short story. I’ve had half this tale sitting on my hard drive for years. I really liked the opening but I could never find a way of making the story work. I got myself into a real tangle by introducing an interesting new character with a big backstory and then not really knowing what to do with her. Frustrated, I put the story away and just left it. A couple of weeks back I decided I was going to finish Read more…

The Sword and Sorcery Bundle of Holding

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The current Bundle of Holding is on a subject very close to my heart. It’s a collection of sword and sorcery games in the spirit of Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Elric. I bought it even though I owned two of the games already. Both of the previous editions of the classic Barbarians of Lemuria are in my collection. BoL a very accessible and well-designed game. The original edition was inspired by Lin Carter’s not-so-classic Thongor novels, which I have already written about elsewhere and it captures the feel of them very well. The bundle contains the Mythic Read more…

Everything Counts in Small Amounts

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A long while back I wrote about how even a 1% change in productivity adds up over the course of a year when you write thousands of words a day. It’s something that has been on my mind, off and on, ever since. I’ve been thinking that you don’t need to write thousands of words a day for small changes to make a difference. For example, writing 100 extra words a day will add 36500 words over the course of a year. That’s the first draft of a novel in under three years. (In under two years if you’re writing Read more…