Where matters stand October 11, 2009

I continue to make slow but careful progress on the current pass through of the draft of my novel The Sleep of Reason. I’m going through it now to slip in seasonal and weather references and to clean up any lingering plot and structural problems I had identified earlier. (Most of these I set in [...]

Finnegans Deciphered August 28, 2009

You can chastise, berate, and tongue-lash me if you wish. I face the big rewrite of my just-finished, first draft of The Sleep of Reason, and then I face the task of rewriting all of it with a third-person narrator, yet I have started writing the next novel from the swirling collection of thoughts, images, [...]

What’s next? August 25, 2009

An expected consequence of “finishing” the first draft of The Sleep of Reason was that my thoughts would be freed a bit to allow other creative ideas to stretch their legs and see how far they might march. I had hoped that this would help me decide what big project to begin next. (I continue [...]

Unlike the others January 19, 2009

I’ve written five novels. None is published, but that’s probably mostly due to my own inertia than to their possible worthiness (or maybe not).
My first two were young adult novels, the first and third parts of a planned trilogy involving interwoven plots and characters. I haven’t looked at these in more than a decade, so [...]

Chapter 12 starts slowly January 6, 2009

I’ve made a slow start on Chapter 12 of The Sleep of Reason. The only way I can account for this is to say that the irregular writing schedule I maintained over the various holidays has broken my momentum.
I have managed to get down more than eight hundred words in the new chapter. That much [...]

Fun on the page December 31, 2008

Do you ever slip sly references into your fiction that only a select few will catch? For example, I intend to write one of my Finnegan novels with the bed and breakfast having the same address as a house my family lived in when I was quite small. I intend to name the characters after [...]

Writing about the weather December 26, 2008

What is the saying about writing about the weather? Is it that those who can’t write, write about the weather? Or is it when you don’t know what else to write, write about the weather?
I’ve decided to write about the weather in The Sleep of Reason. It’s not something that is necessary to the development [...]

Some asides December 9, 2008

If you’ve read some of my earliest posts here, you may recall seeing regular updates on my efforts to get representation for two of my Finnegan cozy mystery novels as well as the submission efforts for some of my short stories. I’ve haven’t give any updates on those efforts recently because I haven’t been shopping [...]

I write like a man, it seems November 22, 2008

For one of my Finnegan novels, I intend to have Greg Finnegan solve the “mystery” by determining that a piece of writing attributed to a writer of one gender is actually the work of a writer of the other gender. This opens a series of revelations that lead to other conclusions in the story. (I [...]

Back on the trail July 24, 2008

I’ve let my third Finnegans mystery novel, Finnegans Afoot, lie fallow for a couple of months. I had finished the first draft back then and decided to walk away from it to get some creative distance. I’ve had a few ideas for enhancing this or developing that. I’ve made some notes and tinkered with sections [...]