I have decided to retire The Slaying of the Bull. That is a stranger sentence to write than I expected. I have abandoned story ideas, cut chapters I once loved, killed characters, scrapped outlines, and consigned more than a few half-written manuscripts to folders where they will probably remain until some future archaeologist excavates myContinue reading “Retiring The Slaying of the Bull”
Tag Archives: book-review
Every Wound Has an Ancestry
As I mentioned in my last post, over the last few weeks, I have been looking backward more than usual. Part of that has come from my Flashback Fridays series, which has forced me to dig through six years of blog posts and revisit the person I was when all of this began. Part ofContinue reading “Every Wound Has an Ancestry”
Flashback Fridays #9
I struggled to find a post to look back on this week. I settled on two that mark the beginning of a transition. In the late summer of 2020, I was entering the doldrums. After the little spurt of sales for The Island of Stone, the numbers tanked, and my strategy for publishing The SlayingContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #9”
Flashback Fridays #8
This week’s Flashback Friday comes from June 7, 2020, and I chose it because I still need the reminder. When writers first begin, every sentence feels precious. We polish, protect, and defend words simply because we suffered to put them on the page. Cutting them can feel less like editing and more like destroying evidenceContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #8”
Every Wound Has an Ancestry
I have spent some time beating myself up for not finishing Absolution of the Morning Star sooner. The series was moving along nicely. Four books were complete, and only two remained. I knew where the story was heading, even if some of the roads were still obscured. Then I got sidetracked by Koen. At first, Koen:Continue reading “Every Wound Has an Ancestry”
Flashback Fridays #7
I skipped a bunch of posts about my writing plans and progress in editing The Slaying of the Bull. They are interesting to me in a documentation way, but since many of those plans changed and The Slaying of the Bull wasn’t the hit I thought it would be at the time, I won’t boreContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #7”
Chasing the Current
Sylvanus: Swords and Sons has now crossed 60,000 words, placing me roughly at the midpoint of the novel. After a long and arduous journey, Sylvanus and his remaining companions are preparing to cross into the Northlands and enter the realm of his brother, Koen. It is a major transition in the story, but also inContinue reading “Chasing the Current”
The Places That Surprise Us
Chicago was never high on my list of places to visit. I had imagined it as something like New York: crowded, gritty, dirty, and weighed down by the age of an old northern city. Large cities are not usually my preferred destinations anyway, so while I was curious about Chicago, I did not arrive withContinue reading “The Places That Surprise Us”
Flashback Fridays #5
By mid-April of 2020, two weeks into this journey, I began to realize that self-publishing the first novel I’d written, Vril, wasn’t a good idea (at least not yet). In the posts below, I began transitioning to reworking The Slaying of the Bull, the fourth book I wrote, and eventually the second book I decidedContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #5”
Flashback Fridays #4
This week’s look into the past was published on April 11, 2020. At that point, it had been exactly a month of COVID isolation, which is why I chose it. It seems like forever ago, but what a strange time that was. Up until that point, working from home was rare for me. It allContinue reading “Flashback Fridays #4”
