The Blog

We’ve entered the last week of Write-a-thon 2022 and, if you haven’t already, I beseech you to please make a donation to Clarion West in my name. A thousand thank you’s to those who have already donated to this great organization. It’s a great time for me to gather strength and motivation from this shared writing community, my family, and friends. Also, there’s nothing like sharing goals and needing to achieve them.

What a week! Thursday I picked up my laptop after four nail-biting days without that necessary and troublesome device. Turns out my laptop wasn’t “fixed” so it went straight back to the boffins and I hope to get it back today. At first I felt trapped at home using Molly’s laptop, not going to my co-working space for morning writing sessions— just in case she needed it. But my amazing wife was away all week making Irish music with friends, so on Wednesday I returned to my shared desk and made a breakthrough on writing the new book. Why now? What happened? What changed?The answer was at my fingertips. I was using a different laptop, the same computer I wrote the initial drafts of my first novel, BLACKFIRE.

There’s that moment in a well-crafted story when our concern that our protagonist won’t overcome the forces working against them grows into a giant problem and we think it’s all over. The bad guy kidnaps the hero's friend, the enemy makes the protagonist public enemy number with a fake story, or the vehicle breaks-down and now the team will never make it to the end in time. Well, I think I hit the third act. This week, fueled by that bubble of excitement in my gut when I’m on to something, I charged out of the gate. Then on Wednesday morning an alert appeared on my screen, “You’re almost out of hard-drive space!” (I paraphrase) My computer is pretty organized, so there are few duplicate files and I don’t download random stuff. After a quick assessment I see the number indicating the remaining twenty gigabytes l available on my computer is counting down like a time bomb, and in some way that’s exactly what it is.

In my ongoing involvement with the Clarion West, Write-a-Thon 2022, the duality of novel writing—drafting and revising—has become a daily discussion. By completion of the first draft of my previous book, BLACKFIRE, I considered myself a drafting wizard, capable of shutting my internal editor off and dumping my unconscious onto the page with nary a concern for quality. Then I spent two years ensconced in revision mode. Combing through the book; page by page; paragraph by paragraph; sentence by sentence; word by word. Carving out useless passages, condensing repetition, and massaging the prose. Draft, after draft, after draft.

I hope you’re doing well. It’s been a wild week for sure. My post-Covid week+ was exhausting and inspiring. Earlier this month I spent a week in Nashville installing, babysitting, and removing an event I designed for the release of Carrie Underwood’s latest album for my client. While a big success for the wonderful folks at UMG-Nashville, my parting gift was direct contact with the pandemic. I spent a few days in bed and a few more on the couch. The aftereffects of the virus left me easily fatigued and battling a real fog in the brain. Last week I stared, mid-sentence, searching for a word—it’s been frustrating. But things have improved.

Once again, I’m taking part in the Clarion West Write-a-thon! Last year, with your support, we raised a humbling $1,920 for this brilliant non-profit that empowers emerging and underrepresented writers of speculative fiction—and I want to repeat that success. A quick update on BLACKFIRE. After WAT21 I collected a baker’s dozen of beta readers who provided some insightful feedback that fueled me to complete a final draft of the novel for query submission. My intention is to query BLACKFIRE with a draft of the sequel complete—no need to make a publisher wait too long.

There’s nothing like starting the day off with a full head of steam and the dream of resurrecting The Burnbox from obscurity. Of course Mr. Murphy drops by and I spend the day in front of the computer—not writing –but serving you dark overlord’s desires. As the hours tick by, the blog entry dashboard remains open—taunting me.

I’m a bit confused here, didn’t they get rid of the “express” already? Riding the elevator with a pleasant employee of this courier service, I joked about the name and he tried to explain to me that the company name is not Federal Express, just FedEx. I smiled in response, not willing to spend all seven of my flights trying to timeline the history of the company name.