How I hacked my ADHD to triple my daily word count

Writing with ADHD can be tough. It’s easy to beat yourself up for being “undisciplined” or “lazy” when the greater problem is that you’re trying to work against your ADHD instead of finding ways to make it work for you. It’s like swimming against a rip current instead of swimming sideways to get out of… Continue reading How I hacked my ADHD to triple my daily word count

A weird thing I’ve noticed

So I’ve been making good progress on Children of the Starry Sea, writing about 2k words or one scene per day. But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve also had a bunch of short stories drop in my lap, two of them from dreams. My best writing time is between 4am and 6am, so… Continue reading A weird thing I’ve noticed

Towards a new measure of writing productivity

When I decided back in college that I wanted to write professionally, I made a point of tracking my daily word counts. I even made graphs with the data, showing both my daily count and a seven-day rolling total (some of you may remember how I used to post those graphs on this blog). Tracking… Continue reading Towards a new measure of writing productivity

Operation SB #3: L’enfer, c’est la solitude

Title: L’enfer, c’est la solitude Genre: Science Fiction Word Count: 6,962 Time: about 40 days I can’t stand people who humbrag, so I’m just going to come out and say that this story is awesome. Seriously. Kickass freaking awesome. It may be the best short story I’ve written to date. Six months from now, I… Continue reading Operation SB #3: L’enfer, c’est la solitude

Random thoughts on creativity and a cover preview

I’ve noticed that I tend to go through at least two revisions on most of my stories.  The first one generally identifies the problems in the rough draft and eliminates them, while the second one adds anything that’s missing and smooths the story over so that it works as a whole.  They both use different… Continue reading Random thoughts on creativity and a cover preview

Unstuck again

For the past few weeks, I’ve been kind of stuck on chapter 3 in Star Wanderers: Benefactor.  This one is a parallel novella to Fidelity, from Jakob’s point of view.  It’s been a lot of fun to write so far–Jakob struggles with a lot of the same issues I do, like self-reliance and independence vs.… Continue reading Unstuck again

On the verge of another story

So with Star Wanderers coming to a close, at least as far as the actual writing is concerned, I’ve recently found myself back in that weird writerly place where I don’t have any pressing projects to work on.  Whenever this happens, I find that it’s generally a good idea to start something new. Until just a… Continue reading On the verge of another story

Managing time and mental space in a foreign country

Some of you asked for a writing update, so I figure I might as well do a quick post on my current projects and where they are.  I’ve also been experimenting with my daily schedule a bit, so it would probably be good to blog about that as well. Right now, the main project taking… Continue reading Managing time and mental space in a foreign country

Q1 2012, or what writer’s angst looks like

Actually, this last quarter wasn’t quite so bad as the title might make it seem.  For the first part, I was on roll, writing almost 25k new words a week.  But then I finished that project, started a new career, moved to the other side of the world…yeah, my writing took a hit.  Or at… Continue reading Q1 2012, or what writer’s angst looks like

Getting settled in the land of the Kartulis

About three weeks have passed since I came to Georgia, and I’m starting to feel comfortably settled in this new place.  I like it a lot out here: my host family is great, I get along really well with everyone at the school where I work, the kids are so crazy eager to learn it’s… Continue reading Getting settled in the land of the Kartulis