Tag: writing
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AlphaSmart and distraction-free writing
It has been impossible for me to write lately without spending time fucking around, checking the web, reading through old email, whatever. So I am trying something new: writing on an AlphaSmart Dana word processor. The Dana is essentially an overgrown Palm Pilot, glued to a full-sized keyboard. It has a monochrome touch screen that’s…
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Twenty Years
I’m writing from the Maui airport, getting ready to board the big silver tube that shoots me across the Pacific and back to the land of wearing full-length pants and bitching about smog and seasonal depression. (And excuse the typos and formatting fuckups here – I’m typing on the extremely buggy WordPress for iOS program,…
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Why I Write
So the next book, which is titled Thunderbird, is done and moving through the steps in publishing. The cover is ironed out, the interior is done, and the kindle version is being tested and tweaked. It’s entering the phases of waiting on robots and meatgrinders to finish churning on what I gave them so I…
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Next book done
I finished my next book yesterday. 26 pieces. 38,845 words. It has a title, but it may change. I’m not really done done yet, because I have to come up with a cover (which I hate) and a book description (which I also hate) and maybe think about a new title. I also have to…
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Mister, if you don’t shut up I’m gonna kick one hundred percent of your ass!
It’s been like a month since I’ve made any kind of update here, which can only mean one of two things: I decided to go to Mexico and write about the drug trade, and got myself killed by Narcoterrorists, or I’m deep in the middle of writing a book and feel all of my energy…
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I do not give a god damn about the book industry
I often get dragged into discussions about the book industry, mostly because people are too stupid to know the difference between Jon and Joe and blindly throw a @jkonrath into a tweet about how publishing is dying or some dumb company is fleecing even dumber authors who did the equivalent of paying $10,000 cash for…
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Twenty Years Later
I just wrote a review for David S. Atkinson’s book Bones Buried in the Dirt (go read it here) and something I mentioned in response to it is actually an idea I had that I will probably never do. His book is told from the point of view of a pre-teen kid, and I mentioned…
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Advice from Raymond Federman
I don’t remember when I got into Raymond Federman, but it was probably during the process of trying to look up every influence Mark Leyner mentioned in interviews. If you haven’t read him, both Take it or Leave it and Double or Nothing are genius, and demonstrate his mastery of experimental narrative. Both of those…
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The Death of Paper Notes
One of the changes in OSX Mountain Lion is that it has a dedicated Notes application. It’s just a basic text editor, except it syncs with other Apple devices. This isn’t entirely new; iOS devices have had a notes app for a while, and it would sync with an IMAP server and show the notes…
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Mandelbrot and Genre Writing
I’ve been in the post-book-release period of my writing cycle where I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I don’t know what I should be reading, so I start poring over non-fiction, usually some junk science book. Specifically, it’s that James Gleick book Chaos, which is about chaos theory and the butterfly effect. I mostly…