Author | Joseph L. Selby

Tag: JEHOVAH’S HITLIST

  • Dystopia, Genre, and Finishing the First Draft

    You may find yourself asking, where has Joe been? He hasn’t been posting three times a day. That’s night like you. You may also find yourself living in a shotgun shack. You may find yourself in another part of the world. If it’s the former, December is when I have to work. And not just…

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  • Time Out

    I have two thousands words left before I complete JEHOVAH’S HITLIST. I just bought SHADOWHEART, the fourth and final volume of the Shadowmarch Tetralogy written by my favorite author, Tad Williams. This is a time for writing and reading a big ass book. …yet SHADOWHEART sits on my table (damn that thing is heavy to…

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  • He Makes the Turn! He Approaches the Finish Line! …OH NO, HE’S TRIPPED!

    So all other obligations were set aside for this evening. Yes, I’m supposed to be making left overs so my wife has something to eat for lunch tomorrow, but she’ll understand. This is ART! I’m flying along and get to the last chapter (now considering making it the second to last). I’m about to have…

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  • The Drawl

    I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been struggling on voice with JEHOVAH’S HITLIST. It’s not so much struggling as I can’t find it. It’s struggling in that I keep changing my mind, so the narrative text is horribly inconsistent. Here’s where I’ve been flipping. Take a nice classic rural drawl. Change of to a, drop the…

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  • Grooving

    Things on JEHOVAH’S HITLIST slowed down for a couple weeks. It occurred to me that I was fast approaching maximum word count and the pacing was too slow. I also was bored as a writer, which means I’ll probably be bored as a reader. I pushed through what I had and sped things up. That…

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  • Wind Sprints

    I wrote the first draft of THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t bad necessarily. It just wasn’t the story I set out to write. The story I had planned was this huge intricate intrigue that spanned the politics of the university, the city, the kingdom! And in the end, a meeting made…

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  • The Obnoxiousness of Fantasy Characters

    Fantasy characters are dicks. In fiction, in D&D adventures, anywhere “adventurer” is available as a life choice, people are dicks. You see it all the time. Main character meets Douchebag McAsshole and DMcA immediately starts talking down to him. I’m a wizard. I’m a barbarian. I don’t bow before anyone. I don’t show any semblance…

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  • 50,000 words

    If not for a dead battery, I would have passed 50,000 words yesterday in my WIP. I instead passed it this morning. Making a similar comment on Twitter yesterday, I pondered why I put so much stock in 50,000 words. Certainly it doesn’t represent the end point of the manuscript nor the midpoint. I have…

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  • Fried Ocher

    I was talking to Elizabeth Poole yesterday who had been absent for a week because she thought she deserved to vacation in another state rather than hang out and talk to me over IM. Silly girl. Anyway, she asked me for an update on JEHOVAH’S HITLIST. I didn’t have much to report. I had invoked…

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  • Accept the Crapitude

    So, invoking rule 2a didn’t have an immediate impact. I chose to finished Bujold’s CRYOBURN1 before getting back to work for a few reasons which I may or may not enumerate below2. Anyway, this morning was technically a writing day, but I quickly realized that rule 2a was unnecessary. The writing was crap, but it…

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