Posts under ‘Fiction’

Two billion eyes blinked for the first time. Two billion feet stepped out from under the bed, from inside the closet, from places lost and forgotten. A billion hands groped for a weapon. Sharp was most pleasing, but anything would do. Not all could join their sisters — so many were headless, legless, mutilated, dismembered [...]

Moonlight flooded the sky, only the brightest stars outshining it. The icy January wind bit deep into her bones. Once she’d been oblivious to temperature, even without her fur coat, but the past few winters had been hard. There were other compensations: her children, grandchildren, even the third and fourth generations. With age the pull [...]

My attention has been pulled in a thousand different directions lately, and writing has suffered the most. Not much blogging, very little fiction. Much pondering of fiction though. I seem to have developed some sort of process for long pieces of fiction.

Come up with an idea: a setting, a scene, a person, a phrase.
Write [...]

Mr. Alexander looked up at the office building. Surely that was new? He glanced at Ms. Sharp, walking beside him. Ms. Sharp was unperturbed. Should he ask her about the large gray metal box, with the three turrets and smokestack? He was certain that it hadn’t been there earlier this week. It looked like the [...]

Soft splats all around me, and I’d forgotten my umbrella again. I brushed a frog from my shoulder and reached down to dislodge another from the German shepherd. The poodle snapped at a falling amphibian. The Airedale just looked disgruntled. At least it wasn’t blood this time. The dogs had tracked that all over the [...]

I’m working on a second-world fantasy novel. The worldbuilding is enormously fun, and also enormously challenging. I have the basics down, but am continuing to refine the details.
The big stuff: geography, climate, major political structures. These are the background to the whole thing (and not independent - geography affects climate, and both affect climate [...]

That’s a bit better: 675 words of new fiction. Then I got interrupted twice, and lost all momentum. But that ends a scene, so its okay. Sort of.
To distract you from my lack of astounding progress (rather than astounding lack of progress; that was yesterday): a writing article. That would be two links if I [...]

Dear World,
I haven’t written a word of fiction since the beginning of September. Lots of thinking about fiction, planning of fiction, research and note-taking, but the butt has not been in the chair. In my ideal world, I would be writing every day. But I don’t live in my ideal world, unfortunately, and I must [...]

Last month a new group, The Outer Alliance, formed to support gender diversity in science fiction and fantasy. The final straw was some idiotic and blatantly prejudiced writing, but there is a lot of more subtle prejudice out there too. For decades, SF particularly has been the province of straight white men, and not necessarily [...]

Anyone following me on Twitter will have noticed a lot of agony about Big Scary Deadline during the past couple of months. BSD, as it became less-than-fondly known, was an application to Viable Paradise, a SFF writing workshop with an exceptional list of instructors. The entry packet: three chapters and a novel synopsis, much like [...]