Five days ago I wrote the last exam for my professional certification. While this is hugely meaningful to me, its main relevance to the Pen is that I now have the time to get back to writing. Doing so is not as easy as one would wish. It's been months since I've written regularly, so I've been looking at various motivation methods and drivers. NaNoWriMo is a good example: all around the world, people start with the goal of a 50,000 word month and go. My last completed novel started as a ... Read more »
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Catching back up: sequels and breaks in writing
Marshall Maresca, another of the Mighty Agent's clients, explains here why he isn't doing NaNoWriMo this year. His methodology for story creation is notably different than mine—and that renders NaNoWriMo less useful for him. Two years back, it was NaNoWriMo that got me going on an idea that had been floating around my head for a while. I have a lot of story ideas running around my head at any given moment (I can list five—no, six—relatively quickly. Three story ideas are in universes where ... Read more »
Words: The Importance of
My last story involving the US Government—ONSET—was based around a SWAT-style team who showed up after due process was written off. This story is about the front-line supernatural cops in the same setting. The conceit of the story is that every US Government branch has an 'Omicron Office' to give supernaturals the same legal process as mundanes. So now, of course, I have to know what said processes are. One of the reasons I like the internet: I google "United States procedure for issuing ... Read more »
Dual-wielding and Human Wave Science Fiction
Given the tagline of this website, an alternative to dual-wielding seems appropriate: Arsenal Firearms has created the first double-barreled .45 pistol. I'm not sure I'd want to fire the thing, but I have a few characters who could. It is a more practical weapon that I originally envisaged one group of characters carrying—let's just leave it at "Metalstorm Pistol". Secondly, there's been an idea sweeping the blogs of the authors I follow. A manifesto, the originator of the idea calls it. ... Read more »
Where do we go from here?
So, with another year finished (though I'll admit to not remembering exactly what day I started this blog) I'm spending a bit of time considering on writing and this blog. Over christmas I was moderately successful with my 'add horror' project with ONSET, which I'm hoping to finish by the end of January. Sadly, reworking the first book like this has led me to the conclusion that I actually dislike my long term plan for the series, so I will be sketching an entirely new, probably much ... Read more »
To make up for some of my lapses in posting, here's an excerpt from my 'adding horror' project on ONSET: “This video clip is from late oh seven,” he told them. “It is camera footage from the commander’s Leopard Tank of Delta Company, Armored Battalion Thirteen of the Swiss Panzerbridge Eleven. They were carrying out training exercises in the Alps, when, well… watch.” The teacher hit a button, and the video clip started. For a moment, all that the gun camera showed ... Read more »