Alright everybody! As promised, I’ve been lining up some author friends to share their first novel stories while we wait to see how my little manuscript fares out in the big scary world. First up is a good friend of mine that I bonded with through violent arguments on social media, Erik Scott de Bie. […]
Read more +Well, I wasn’t going to do one of these political posts again for a while, but the traffic’s been a little slow around here since the last one. So, give the people what they want, I suppose. There is a brewing controversy over the implementation and bugs found in the www.healthcare.gov system, accompanied by generous […]
Read more +After some mild distractions, (which garnered exponentially more web traffic, ahem…) I’m happy to report that Any Port in a Storm has nothing to report. Since the last episode, the only notable thing that has happened for my manuscript is a personalized email from the publisher confirming receipt of said manuscript, with a promise to […]
Read more +After the smashing success of my last post on the government shutdown, I’m steering back away from the political and returning to talking about writing, anticipating an accompanying and deeply depressing drop in web traffic as a result. Still, I’ve learned something exciting and really want to shout about it, so here goes. As my […]
Read more +Hi. My name is Patrick, and I’m a conservative. And as a conservative, I’m furious at the behavior that has led to the shutdown of the U.S. Federal Government. But even more than that, I am positively livid at the weak-kneed media and the larger population that continues to believe that both parties in our […]
Read more +Good morning, everyone. It’s been two weeks since I came home from WorldCon San Antonio. It was a productive convention, and in the aftermath Any Port in a Storm was sent out to an agent and an acquisitions editor (my friend Michael R. Underwood has some smart things to say about attending conventions as an […]
Read more +Hello gang. I’m back home and ready to step back into my ‘regular’ life. This installment of After the Draft was supposed to focus on writing a good query letter and synopsis for your novel, (an exercise I’ve previously compared to editing the complete Director’s Cut Lord of the Rings trilogy into a gif file), […]
Read more +M’kay, for anyone confused or complaining about the different reactions to the Trayvon Martin shooting and the recent murder of Christopher Lane, let me explain why the comparison is a false equivalence. First, no one is saying that white-on-black crime is more serious or less forgivable than the reverse. Anyone who thinks this is the […]
Read more +Okay, my day of celebration is over and it’s time to start polishing up this manuscript. The first time you finish a novel and go back for a read-through can be a little strange, at least it was for me. There were parts of the story that I hadn’t read for over a year. Enough […]
Read more +Yesterday, I finished the first draft of a high-fantasy novel I’ve been working on titled Any Port in a Storm. Hooray me! This draft came in at 107,324 words, and took about eight months to write in total, not counting several long breaks I took to write a pair of unrelated novellas and several short […]
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