Musings of Two Creative Minds

For those of you who haven't heard yet, my father-in-law has been fighting cancer for the last year.  Unfortunately, he's fought the good fight but due to masses of blood clots in his head, they cannot finish the job.  So he is now in hospice care at home.  As you can imagine my wife, myself, and our family are devastated and are trying to spend as much time with him as we can.    So I won't be posting as much, but I don't want my readers to be left without much new here. So I'm offering you all the chance to post articles about writing here on my blog.  Feel free to push a book or books of yours, but please offer some tidbits or story about an aspect of writing and how it affected that particular book(s).   I'm looking for insights into plot, editing, characters, development, rewrites, cover art, publishing, agents, self-publishing, etc.  Again, all I ask is that if your pushing  book, make sure the article connects to it.   I ...

Okay I haven't said anything about "The Ship" lately so I thought I'd bring you all up to date on what's happening on that front.  The news is that there's been a lot of writing and rewriting of scenes as I try to get the first draft done.  I find writing the 2nd book more slow at times, but the quality of what I'm creating is better overall.  Because I know some of what to watch out for.  Are the characters behaving like themselves?  Am I making the motivations for their actions clear?  Is this believable? Are things easy to follow and not confusing for the reader?  Am I doing a good job introducing and re-introducing the main characters for both previous readers and those who are new to the series? Usually, a lot of this would be caught in the second and third drafts.  But from my perspective, a lot of this has make sense to ME before I can expect my readers to follow it.  And if what I've done isn't working for me, there's a problem. ...

Sorry again for the long time between posts.  A lot has been going on since college let out.  Shortly before I finished my classes I started a new job whose hours have been fluctuating quite a bit.  Secondly, I'm still sharing my laptop with my wife until we can afford to fix hers, so even when I'm not working I still have limited access and am usually trying to write as well as use my laptop for TV viewing.  (We don't have cable or DISH or anything else right now, can't afford it).  And finally, we are in the process of slowly packing up our apartment in anticipation of moving towards the end of July.  So a lot of things have been going on and slowing down my writing and blogging.  Hopefully, after we move this will all change quickly.  Especially since after we do move, I'll only have a 5-10 minute commute instead of a 40-45 minute one and that's just one-way. Now, that I've explained all that, let's get on to today's topic.  Roadblocks i...

Okay, I know I kept a lot of you in suspense this week about what's been happening on with my manuscript that is in New York.  Well, I followed up on it earlier this week and learned that it was finally looked over.  Now the way the agent who has it works is as follows.  She has recently hired a number of junior agents who do not represent clients yet, but read over manuscripts and decide whether they were good enough to pass on to the agent herself for review.  This weeding out process helps her out immensely, because she gets so many submissions and had built up a bit of a backlog.  My MS for "THE BRIDGE" had been in that backlog, which was why it took so long to hear back on it.   And the verdict is.... My very first manuscript is going to be sent on to the agent herself to read and considered for representation.  Now, the agent asked if I would like to see the comments and feedback from her 'readers' in case I wanted to make any edits befo...

Just a quick post here.  I put up the link where you can read another scene from my horror/mystery/sci-fi novel "The Bridge".  I'll be posting here about writing again soon.  I'm using the other blog mostly to post samples of my works, both completed and still in progress.  I hope you get a chance to check them about.  Have a great weekend everyone.

I have a Writer's Page on  Facebook, where I post whatever progress I made on my writing.  So the other day I looked at several of my recent entries where I talk about how much progress I was making.  I was counting how many words per day I had written and this sounded really good.  But when I went back to the novel itself it felt like I hadn't made a lot of progress after all.  This puzzled me exceedingly so I started to think about it.  As I did so my eyes focused on the novel in progress and I spotted several areas where I needed to fix a problem.  That's when I had a "Light Bulb Moment", I was editing while I was still creating the first draft.  Not a bad thing in and of itself, but I had been doing this almost constantly.  Each day I'd go back to see what I had done when I left off in order to recapture the mood and the moment and I wound up doing bunch of 'repairs' before moving on.  Now don't get me wrong, it's important to make...