No doubt 2017 was a rough year for a lot of the world. I find myself among the privileged, so I can only imagine how it was for those who can’t hide away from the awful things in the news, because those things are a part of their reality. So instead of lingering on the painful moments, and in the spirit of thankfulness, I wanted to record a few of my most beautiful moments of…
The roots of his teeth were magic. He could feel the storms in them, knew the names of the winds before they blew through his woods. Her fingernails were magic. They glimmered when a child lied in her presence. Their loom was magic. They wove stories into the blankets they made, stories whispered nightly in a sleeper’s ear to soothe or disturb. The tuft of hair that always fled her ponytail was magic. It pointed…
Earlier this year, squadmate Amy sent me a Sarah Cooper article. Beyond the fact that the article was painfully spot-on (I’m guilty of all of them except maybe the one-handed typing and the moustache), it was well-written and enticing. I went deeper into her catalog. And I found “Do You Take Yourself Seriously?” My heart sank as I read through it. Because no, I didn’t, not really. These three quotes stood out to me, as…
This week has flown by, being Christmas week and all — and as such, it wasn’t the most productive week at the Damn Shames Studio. PSH. Who am I kidding? I finished a book! That was the most significant moment this week: I finished my first draft of “Portent” right around midnight last night. It clocks in around 65k words, which is about 5k less than I thought I’d hit by the time I finished Draft #1.…
OH MAN. You know you’re in for an exciting ride when that’s the title of a blog post. (Sorry, kids, SEO reasons.) But before you run off, already bored, let me tell you about something that makes my meal planning really easy. (Whoops! This isn’t a writing-related example, per se – but if I didn’t have a meal plan in place, with a household of five adults, I wouldn’t have time to write. So. Tangentially related!) As I might…
This was a good week in the Damn Shames Studio! As this is the first installment of Studiolog, I’ll cover a little bit of last week’s Shamesian activities too, since they were quite relevant to this week. First, we worked with Nicole of Mischief & Mouse (who I talked a bit about last week) to create a parody of the children’s book that launched several series: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Ours is…
Tables are the best. (NERD ALERT.) I’m no traditionally-trained project manager, but damn if I don’t love to track things in columns and rows. Here’s a pretty traditional usage of tables in my OneNote notebooks: my breakdown of our first issue of Ships Illustrated. Nothing fancy! Just the content, the person responsible, and the status. Nice and basic. This is another table I created to track a Star Citizen-related project — ship buyer’s guides. This broke…
Weird fiction fragments spilling out of my notebook tonight… He’d given her the headset as a joke — well, at least she’d thought it was a joke when he’d done it. She’d laughed and agreed to maybe try it out, understand him a little better. She tried it on the guest profile first, assuming she wouldn’t care to save her place. But when she put it over her eyes, and the lights went down and…
I’m starting to learn my own creative wave, my rhythm. It’s not exactly aligned to the mountain seasons, but it sticks pretty close. For me, the cold, dark months are for curling up and digesting heavier stories, more thoughtful fare, including non-fiction. They’re also for browsing through full notebooks and harvesting old ideas, and shuffling virtual notes around to experience them all again. Then the bright, rainy months are for slow, quiet progress, and revisiting…
I said something vaguely profound to my friend Amy in our GroupMe chat the other day. To me, I told her, “Life is about constantly halving the distance between yourself and perfection.” I like that. Nice job, me. That said, this isn’t an original concept. It’s a lot like the Pareto principle, or the concept of the asymptote from mathematics. Clearly, far more intelligent people than me have been thinking along these lines for a long time.…
