Category Archives: update

Issues With Comments?

I got an email this morning from a reader, Deuce Richardson, who tried to comment twice on the Machen post.I’ve added his comment to that post and had no trouble with it.

This is the message he got:

Not Acceptable!
An appropriate representation of the requested resource could not be found on this server. This error was generated by Mod_Security.
I’ve never seen this message before. Has anyone else gotten this when they tried to post?

February Writing Update

I’m doing a challenge to write 2024 words per day (on average) in 2024. I ended January a little bit ahead, but I finished February about four and a half days behind, with just over fifty thousand words written. This puts me behind for the year.

But there are still ten months left in the year, so I have plenty of time to catch up. As of yesterday, I was over a day ahead for the month of March.

Most of what I wrote were blog posts or the current work in progress, which is dark fantasy. I started it intending it to be a short story, but I soon realized it would be something longer, probably a novel. It turned out I was right on that point. It will be a novel. I was thinking it would come in somewhere between fifty thousand and sixty thousand words. I passed sixty-two thousand words last night. I have at least three major scenes left to write, so at this point, I’m expecting it to come in at over seventy thousand words.

Other than blog posts,  I’m going to keep plugging away at this one until it’s done.

Quick Writng Update: Three Out of Four Ain’t Bad

So for the last eight days, I’ve had four short story deadlines. I made three out of four, including the last about half an hour ago.

The first was for a mystery sf workshop. So were the next two, although the setting had to be the same in both and different from the first. These were for a study along I was doing since I couldn’t attend the in-person session. I’d had some lead time on the first one since it had to be written before the workshop started. The other two I got during the workshop and had only two days on each one to finish. I didn’t  make the second one because I was driviing the day the prompt was given and spent half of the second day dealing with insurance and roofers. By the time I got to it, the day was nearly over, and I was falling asleep over the keyboard.

I also think this story would have ended up too long for the length requirement. I’ll finish it since I like the setup, and I got good feedback on the setting in the first story of this pair.

The fourth story is for a holiday project that will be published at the end of the year. I would love to be published in this project and the anthology that goes with it. We’ll have to see. I got started on it yesterday, and today I scrapped what I’d done. I’ll still go back and finish the story, but the fantasy element, which is one of the things the editor will be looking at, was weak. The story I wrote this afternoon is, I think, a much better fit for the project.

On the 2024 words per day in 2024, I’m about a day behind, alhtough I’ve made a lot of progress catching up today. There have been, and will continue to be, some days when I won’t be able to get much writing done due to having to be on the road. Some of those days I won’t get much notice on since they are job-related, and the nature of the travel is such that it happens when it happens.

Now, back to the keyboard.

Entering 2024, With Trepidation

So it’s a new year. We’ll call it 2024, although there are other calendars with different years and different start dates.

This will be a long post, because I’m going to give a recap of last year.  Apologies for repetition, because some of this has been covered in other posts.

2023 Recap

In late 2021, my parents moved from where they were living to a nearby town. I still don’t understand all the reasons. Part of it was to be closer to my brother, who lives there. They had been living on some property my grandparents had bought in the late 60s when they retired. It’s between nine and ten acres in size.

My wife immediately began asking me if we could buy the property. After nearly a year, I finally gave in and said yes. I didn’t want the property to pass out of the family, and it’s the one piece of geography that has been in my life for the entire life.

There were also job reasons coming into play.  The university was building a new scieince building, and I was getting to watch the sausage being made, as the saying goes. There were some decisions made, one in particular, that would make my life much more unpleasant once the building was complete. Add to that the fact that the quality of the student body was declining, and it was time to get out. (I can’t tell those stories.)

My wife got a job at the prison here in the spring. I tendered my resignation effective the last day of August. Most of the move has been completed. There are still a few items of furniture, odds and ends, and boxes of books that need to be moved.

I have a job as postmaster relief at a small rural post office in the mornings and work as needed at a funeral home in the afternoons. To put it another way, I deliver mail in the morning and bodies in the afternoon.

Things have been so hectic that I haven’t gotten much reading done, especially in the last few months. Most of the reading I’ve managed to do has been in the mystery and thriller genres. I have been taking some online writing classes. A large portion of the reading has been assignments for those classes.

I’ve completed several short stories which are either under consideration at some markets or I’ve got some finished that need to be submitted.

2024 Plans

I’m contiinuing to take the writing classes. IThey are of varying length. Some are three weeks long and have a story assignment. Others are six or nine weeks long. One that I started last year and is continuing into this year has to do with business practices for writers. Things are changing in the publishing world in some exciting ways. I’m making some plans that are too prelimnary to be discussed yet, but I’ll you let you know when they are implemented.

One of the writing projects I’ve undertaken is to write an average of 2,024 words per day in 2024. That’s consumable words. Fiction, nonfiction, introductions to books or stories, blog posts. Anything that is for other people to read. Comments on blogs/Facebook/social media won’t count, and neither will emails.

What that means is I expect to do a lot more blogging this year than in the past year or so, since what I’m writing now applies towards today’s word count.

What am I going to write about?

I don’t know yet.

I’m going to cut back on reviewing books by writers who are currently active. If I’m going to ramp up my fiction production, then there’s the possiblity of a conflict of interest. There was a recent situation where an author with her first novel got caught setting up sock puppet accounts on Goodreads and trashing books by other writers she saw as being competition for hers. Her book wasn’t even scheduled to be  published until sometime in May of this year, I think it was.  And some of the books she was trashing were by other debut authors at the same publisher.

I’d just as soon stay away from the possibility of being in a situation that even looks like that. Not that I have any desire to be traditionally published.

What I’ll probably do is ramp up the birthday posts and focus more on older works by writers who have passed on or are no longer writing. C. L. Moore and Robert E. Howard both have birthdays later this month, so I’ll be working on those. I still have that tribute to David Drake to write.

I’ll also provide commentary on anything of significance in the sf/fantasy/horror/mystery fields that catches my eye.

I’ve got enough short stories that I could publish another couple of collections from my inventory. That is a project I’ll be working on this month. The funeral home job is on an as needed basis, so my afternoon schedule is uncertain. That’s when I would be working on writing. Once my wife gets home, she tends to want me to spend  some time with her. And I’m fine with that.

So, that’s the general outlook for 2024 as far as writing goes.

As for other projects, I will be setting up shelves and unpackiing books over the next few weeks. I might provide some pictures. I should be able to put in a garden this spring. It’s dark enough where I live, even with our security lights and the neighbors lights that I can see plenty of stars, so I might take up observational astronomy. I was in charge of a small observatory for a  year while I was in graduate school, and I kind of miss being able to see dark skies. Now I can.

All of this, of course is subject to change if something else catches my interest as well as acts of Murphy.

Quick, Overdue Update

I’m not dead. And I haven’t killed anybody (whose body has been discovered, at least).

I am swamped with a couple of things.

First of all, work. This semester is keeping me busy. Both my classes started at capacity, including my 8:00 AM section.I just gave the first exam and have barely made a dent int he grading. My department head seems to have a new hobby. Thinking up more things for me to do.

I also have a new hobby. No, it’s not thinking up more things for me to do. Although it might resemble such to the untrained eye.

I’ve been taking some online writing workshops. So far they have been worth the time. I’ve learned a lot. There was a sale on them last week, and I signed up for two more. They are six week workshops, and they, along with a three week workshop that was a Kickstarter exclusive, start over the next two days.

So most of the writing I’m going to be doing will be either for these workshops or other fiction projects I’ve got in the works. More on those when they are ready to hatch.

Most of my reading has been short fiction, although there’s one novel I want to review. I will try to fit it in later this week. I read the hardcover and the paper edition comes out soon.

I will try to do a better job on birthday posts. (Ignores the dirty look from Theodore Sturgeon’s ghost.)

If you will excuse me, I’ve got fiction to get started on.

No, I’m not Dead

I’ve been swamped with work. Plus I’m trying to get  some actual fiction writing done. So I’ve not been reading much other than short fiction, much of that related to writing. I hope to post a Christmas ghost story or two this year and have been reading some to get in the right frame of mind.

Things should settle down a bit soon.

2020 Turns 21 and Can Legally Drink

No, the title of this post isn’t original with me, but it’s too good not to steal. I’m not expecting things to magically improve just because the year on the calendar has changed. Call me pessimistic, but I expect this year to be a lot like the last one . I hope I’m wrong. We’ll see.

As I stated yesterday, my plans for the Asimov and Bradbury centennials and the 90th anniversary of Astounding didn’t work out the way I had intended. I’m not planning on trying to restart them this year, although I will try to put more Bradbury and Asimov in the rotation throughout the year. Continue reading