At long last, after more than a year, the rough draft of Children of the Starry Sea is now complete! It clocked in at just over 149k words, which makes it the longest book I have written since I started publishing (the first novel I ever finished was a 168k word train wreck that will… Continue reading IT IS DONE
Category: Outworld Trilogy
New Star Wanderers cover mockup
So I’ve been playing around with Stable Diffusion, working on a new cover for Star Wanderers. This is what I came up with: What do you guys think? And how does it compare with the cover mockup I did yesterday for Children of the Starry Sea? …and now I should probably take a break from… Continue reading New Star Wanderers cover mockup
So I’ve been playing around with AI art…
Note: this post originally appeared in my newsletter, but I was so excited about it that I decided to post it here too. Enjoy! So my wife is getting a PhD in computer science, which means that she’s on the cutting edge of research into things like language learning and topic models and other techy… Continue reading So I’ve been playing around with AI art…
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
Toward a new writing technique
For the last year, I’ve been struggling to write this novel (Children of the Starry Sea, Book 2 of the Outworld Trilogy) according to my new novel writing method, which I’ve been developing since about 2017. The method involves creating a rigorous scene-by-scene outline and cycling through each scene multiple times, so that you basically… Continue reading Toward a new writing technique
Rethinking some things
So I had an extremely vivid dream last Friday night where I got cancer and learned that I had only a month to live. Among other things, I found myself asking: “What am I going to do about my writing career? Who is going to finish all these books? Are they going to fade into… Continue reading Rethinking some things
Bowing Out
Back at the end of August, I blogged about how I was going to do a writing challenge in September to produce more short stories to fill out my publishing queue. At the time, I had a couple of stories that looked like they were going to be picked up by one of the major… Continue reading Bowing Out
New Short Story Writing Challenge
I self-publish a new short story every month, and I try to keep at least six in the hole so that I have some time to send each one to the magazines and anthologies. Right now, I’ve only got three, soon to be two, so I need to write some short stories. Sounds like it’s… Continue reading New Short Story Writing Challenge
Slight Change of Direction
I’m currently a little over 54k words into the rough draft of Children of the Starry Sea, the sequel to Star Wanderers and second book in the Outworld Trilogy. Most of my novels fall somewhere between 40k and 80k words, so if this was a typical WIP, I would be pretty close to finishing it.… Continue reading Slight Change of Direction