Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have advanced along the road to publication. I’m getting my formatting down, maybe by the end of my next weekend off. I’m asking questions and getting useful answers, playing with rudimentary tools. I’m not trying to reinvent the formatting wheel here folks, something serviceable and stable will …
Continue reading Time Travel, Prep Work, and not Fighting my Brain
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have not made much progress this week. My day job has been rather more demanding recently, but that isn’t the excuse. Or if it is, it’s a bit lame. The book is ready. I have progressed with formatting, but not enough. And the fact is I’m not …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! As regular readers may know, I have begun to learn more about some formal aspects of storytelling. I’m doing this to sharpen my understanding of what I do and why in writing novels, and to improve my presentation on the page. A bit late after completing 3 books …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I am loath to admit it, but my publication process has stalled. I had a formatter, but they appear to have gone incommunicado. I hope they are okay, but I need to move on. To that end, I have decided to dip my toe in the waters of …
Hello, my friends and occasional relative! I have re-engaged with self-directed learning this week, and have been watching and taking notes from the highly helpful Ellen Brock. I think I first bookmarked a video of hers ten years ago, and only now do I sit down to actually pay close attention! My intention is to …
Continue reading Methodological Madness and Intuitively Plotting your way out of Pantsing!
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! First off: happy Hogmanay! Best wishes to you all in 2025. I wrote a long blog about conflict and co-operation as a follow up to my discussion of complexity and coherence, and rather disappeared up my own fundament in the process, lots of dubious anthropology and theories …
Continue reading The Writing Life: The Treasure in Trash, a Convert’s Tale.
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This is my third stab at this blog. I’ve missed weekly deadlines as a result. Originality warning! There isn’t any here, but I wanted to say it anyway. The world is a complex place. We are complex creatures. But we delight in reducing the complex to the simple, …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Sorry for the absence of blog last week: I was being mostly off-grid, which was delightful. This week: new cover reveal! Ta da! The off-gridness was a result of me being busy during travel, and my body wants more sleepy byes, so now I'm going to do that. …
This is going to be brief, because I have little time. Every year my wife and I put up the same tree. It has the same ornaments (with an extra one or two to commemorate any travels we may have been on), the same lights, the same insane amount of tinsel garlands that I insist …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have had two full strength coffees. I should be powered up beyond belief. But I ate two grotesquely sugared cookies (I was sugar free for about 5 months this year and fell off the wagon just before Hallowe’en, not a good time to give in to temptation! …
Continue reading Jazzed to Sluggishly Meet you, My dear Boswell.
Roderick T. Macdonald 