A weekly progress report as I work through the (second pass) editing of my current fantasy novel.

Another good week. Before I jump into the numbers, some reflection: I find myself cutting a lot of "junk". By that I mean passages that are nothing more than info dumps or scenes where a character is thinking, introspectively, mayhap trying to rationalize something out, but I'm finding those paragraphs kind of tedious to read. I can only assume if I find them so, how's a reader going to feel? That's an excellent warning sign of something that probably needs to go. In fact, if you take nothing else from this post, take that. If you find ... [More]

Another round of interesting things I came across, out a day late because yesterday was post-xmas shopping day and, more importantly, a day after xmas bike ride to burn off some of those xmas day calories.

Here they are.

Do Science Fiction Fans Hate Libraries?

My friend Megan is a librarian at a major metropolitan library. She recently asked me "why don't sci-fi and fantasy readers use libraries?" I was taken aback - I figured that genre fans everywhere used libraries and that would include readers of science fiction. But no, apparently they don't.

Discipline

If you're a writer, there a... [More]

A weekly progress report as I work through the (second pass) editing of my current fantasy novel.

This was a good week. Much better than last, anyway. I managed to edit through 28 pages total, only 2 of which came from page reduction. That puts me at a current page of 125, up from last week's 99, out of 361 pages total, down from last week's 363.

Here's the first graph:

Percentage complete, now at 34.63% (I'm 1/3rd of the way there!):

Last, total word count, which now stands at 105,870 compared to last week's 106,591:

So, I dropped about 700 words, which more or less continues my downward trend as shown directly above. Still,... [More]

Here's this weekend's cool and interesting links for your viewing pleasure.

The Great American Query Letter

Recently, funny things have been happening in my slush pile. I find myself receiving well-written, correctly formatted, professional-looking query letters from bad writers.

Saturn's Atmosphere Is A Modern Art Sensation

This isn't a newly-discovered Rothko painting or some kind of abstract masterpiece — it's the atmosphere of Saturn, photographed four different times on the same day.

Who are the Most Memorable Characters in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror?

Who are the mo... [More]