Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Spoiler alert: what follows below is an additional apprentice's report upon the story told by Stahl in The Killer and The Dead. There are seven already present at the end of the novel. Yep, I included commentaries on my story at the end of the story: I thought …
Continue reading The Killer and The Dead: The Jaded Apprentice’s Report
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I’m sorry I missed last’s weeks epistle. Very busy. I thought about posting an introduction to one of my new characters in the not at all fast fiction I am still working on starting, and then decided it just contained too much cool stuff I wasn’t ready to …
Continue reading Publication date for The Gardener and The Goddess
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have a formatted version of my book. I have to do the page by page review for widows and orphans (if you know, you unfortunately know), and last bits of tidying up, hopefully without getting sucked into perfectionism minutiae. I was looking through the text and suddenly …
Continue reading Progress, Perfectionism as a failed landmine, and Amped up Porridge
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, …
Roderick T. Macdonald 