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So at any given time, I have a number of stories forming in my brain and existing at different stages of doneness. The most immediate story is the one I’m querying at the moment. After that is the one I’m actively writing. Third comes the one in the “hopper,” the one that shows the most…
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I just finished watching John Leguizamo’s HBO special, Ghetto Klown. It’s pretty awesome, especially if you like auto-biographies. What I liked most was his characterization of his father. Well, I liked a lot of it, but what I found most inspiration from a creative sense was his characterization of his grandfather. A Colombian communist who…
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As I’ve been mentioning for the last year or so, I’m an official with New Hampshire Roller Derby. Despite it being the fastest growing sport in the country (and possibly the world), it’s still an amateur sport that most people don’t know has made a resurgence (or if they do, they presume it’s much like…
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I was in Fort Lauderdale last weekend, officiating Beach Brawl 2014 (and yes, I’ll write a post explaining roller derby, given the number of times it’s been requested), and I left my Flash drive in the business center of the hotel. I don’t really use it anymore. Once upon a time, Dropbox wasn’t as useful…
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Like so many creative people, I struggle with depression. I’m one of the fortunate ones in that I received help for the problem early on in my life and have been able to learn the warning signs of when things are bottoming out. That doesn’t mean anything’s been fixed. You don’t fix depression. You learn…
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I always take a little break between manuscripts. I consider it a “voice reset.” I used to be so jazzed I would immediately roll into a new project, but I found the voice of the next project sounded exactly the same as the one I had just finished. It inevitably led to a lot of…
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This post should almost be labeled a redux because I’ve posted so much of the conversation before. I am once again dealing with that balancing act of craft vs voice. I think more aspiring writers would do well to actually listen, absorb, and apply the feedback they receive from agents when they query. Too often…
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Some friends and I were talking about individualized education, which is a real passion of mine. That led to stories about our grade school experiences and those times when the teachers didn’t know what to do with the advanced kids (set them aside, have them self-teach, and assign extra work was my horrible experience). This…
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I don’t normally do a year in review because my pursuit of publication has been an ongoing effort for over four years now and that story has only changed somewhat. Write a novel -> query, write a novel -> query, start new year, repeat. That was 2009 through 2011. Then came 2012, the year of…