Posted in Writing, tagged #amwriting, creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 26 Nov 2019| Leave a Comment »
The final week of this year’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) has been a mixed bag. Overall, I have to say I’m pleased with the experiment. Using NaNoWriMo as a way to simply increase my productivity has proved a much better approach (for me) than setting some unrealistic (for me) word-count goal. (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged #amwriting, creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 21 Nov 2019| Leave a Comment »
Week Three of NaNoWriMo has been productive. Sort of.
At the end of last week, I was facing a scene I’ve been dreading for a long time. A sex scene.
I hate writing sex scenes. (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged #amwriting, creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 14 Nov 2019| Leave a Comment »
My second week of NaNoWriMo went better than my first, and there’s a reason for that (apart from my getting back into the flow of writing, that is).
Like many writers, I’ve often used a soundtrack to set an audio foundation for my writing time. A soundtrack can do two things. First, it can set a consistent mood that underpins the prose as I write, and second, it can help block out the sounds of the real world and allow me to concentrate more fully on the world I’m trying to get out of my head. (On the downside, it can also ruin a particular album/artist, as eventually, due to repetition and earworms, I grow sick of what I’m listening to.) (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged #amwriting, creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 07 Nov 2019| 1 Comment »
It wasn’t a good first week for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but progress, albeit modest, was made.
I suspect my challenges are the same as many of yours:
Posted in Writing, tagged climate change, creative writing, global warming, rising seas, short fiction on 01 Nov 2019|
Twenty-odd years ago (when I was just starting out with speculative fiction), I wrote the short-short below. It was a light-hearted look at a theory that was, back then, just emerging into the popular culture. Several recent headlines brought it back to mind, and it ain’t so funny, anymore.
Posted in Writing, tagged creative writing, nanowrimo, novel writing, writing life on 26 Oct 2019| 4 Comments »
Posted in Creativity, Writing, tagged creative writing, Creativity, short fiction, Writing, writing novels on 29 Aug 2019| 1 Comment »
The Princess Gang rolled into the cul-de-sac on the same day Mr. B’s plum tree decided to bloom.
That’s the first line from a story that started flowing yesterday. Remembering, of course, that (say it with me) all first drafts are crap, it’ll obviously go through some revisions, but the important thing is that it was followed by a thousand words of a quiet little story that’s been pinballing around my brain for over a year.
The reason I share this is because nothing like this has happened for a long, long time.
Yes, I’ve written some fiction in the past handful of years. Most of it has been in posts on this very blog—vignettes, word imagery, poems—all meant for immediate consumption. I’ve also been slugging my way through a championship bout with a new novel which, though reportedly of good quality (especially for a first draft), has been the most difficult fiction project of my life. But a short story, a for-real short story? It’s been years. The last one I wrote was “The Book of Solomon.” It’s good, and it found a home in The Timberline Review, but I wrote that story years ago, and there has been zip-a-dee-doo-dah since.
Then yesterday: Boom. My pen began to work. My brain began to conjure. It was like my voice suddenly returned after a decade of muted trauma.
Why? (more…)
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 