I set ambitious writing goals for this year. Goal 1: Finish the first draft of BENEATH A SUNDERED SKY (150,000 words) Goal 2: Finish the first draft of WHAT’S BEHIND THE CROOKED DOOR? (15,000 words) Goal 3: Finish the third (first final) draft of PRINCE OF CATS (50,000 words) Goal 4: Rewrite BLACK MAGIC AND…
For my old job I used to travel to Europe. Sitting in a bar in Amsterdam, I often heard a style of electronica that really spoke to me. It was a popular house music there that everyone seemed to know, but no one would explain to a silly American. It was unlike anything I heard…
When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money. “Attention K-Mart shoppers” was a frequent phrase uttered over the PA system, to give you a frame of reference. (Younger readers, K-Mart is like Wal-Mart before Wal-Mart was Wal-Mart.) Unfortunately, the quality of goods to be obtained there was not always the best.…
So my wife and I used the last of our groupons for the year. We’re fortunate that she acquired so many earlier this year because with our current financial hardships, none of this would have been possible. A year ago for my birthday, I drove up to the North Country. I had the day off…
I’ve said this before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: To help your reader believe the fantastic, make sure they recognize the mundane. It’s an easy (lazy) hand-wave to excuse inconsistencies in fantasy by saying “this isn’t the real world” when so much of the book mirrors the real world. Rarely do we create…
My friend Good Ken1 Braun is in town. We are leaving for Canada today for he has never been out of the United States and I will pop his international cherry. We go to Montreal for a couple days and then Quebec City. This is the first vacation I’ve had in years. While money is…
Groupon Queen discovered that we lived near the nation’s third largest living history museum, Old Sturbridge Village. This is a village as you would have found it in 1835 New England, and many of the buildings are actually from that period transplanted from one of the various states. Actors/educators are in period dress and conduct…
I finished my rewrite, began PRINCE OF CATS (which is going awesomely–beyond awesomely really, I’m flying), and the summer crush is over. Obviously you can tell that because I’m blogging, thus my hours are not filled with making content to educate the next generation of politicians who will hopefully ben an improvement over our current…
We have a tradition here in the Selby household. My wife’s birthday is a month and a half before mine and our anniversary is in between. We make a birthaversary event out of it. For each of our birthdays, we choose a place we want to eat and an adventure we want to go on.…