We tend to have tunnel vision, seeing only the things directly in front of us. As authors, though, I feel like it’s kind of our duty to break free of that comfort zone and take in everything we can. When we put pen to paper and tell a story, it should be to tell stories […]
Author Archive > Adam
Lessons from Camp Revision: Split Screen
Late last year, I finished the first draft of my first novel. I celebrated. I printed it out. I re-read it and scribbled across its pages in glorious red ink. And then I ignored it for a couple months. I sat down to start revising, earlier this year, and I felt my soul wrench. I […]
Working through self-doubt
I live with a character flaw that I cope with on a daily basis. It drags me down, sometimes to the edge of despair, like a lead weight tied around my waist. I know I’m not alone; most of my writers friends suffer from the same ailment. There is solidarity in our struggle — an […]
A Willingness to Learn
I was a really lousy student, from grade school through my first attempt at college. Teachers thought I might be slow and made me suffer through batteries of tests and classes on preparation in an effort to get me to do my homework. It didn’t work. I barely made it through grade 12 and I […]
Flash Fiction Friday: Pacing
The best insight comes when you least expect it. I was in Toronto a couple weekends ago, at Ad Astra. I sat in a room on Sunday afternoon with twenty other writers, staring at a piece of flash fiction I wrote for their annual writing contest. I hadn’t won, and while I waited to talk […]
Rules of writing: the auto-tune of literature
No one can tell me how to be me. The same goes for being a writer. Yet, I can’t help myself. The internet is full of mostly well-intentioned advice on writing — forums, essays, lists, and opinionated rant — and I soak it up. Chuck Wendig’s blog, one of my current favorites, is full of fun […]
Interview: Jay Lake
An October 2009 LiveJournal post about acceptances and rejections by Jay Lake led to an email exchange about his submission statistics. He graciously sent me a copy of his spreadsheet and I was going to compile some pretty, pretty graphs based on the data. I began a drastic life change (divorce) a week later and […]
The Persistence of Recordkeeping
I screwed up earlier this week. I submitted a story to a pro market, and verified its status the next morning. Imagine my dismay when I saw, in the list of previously rejected stories, the same one I’d just sent them. I did what needed to be done, promptly sending a withdrawal and apology to […]
The Clarion Writers’ Workshop
As best I can remember, my journey to Clarion began in 1989, with a classified ad in the the back of Asimov’s magazine. Fast forward through fifteen years or so of life and career. I’d retired from writing a tech column online to take some creative writing classes at my local community college and was […]
Dropbox: A Primer for Writers
Whether it’s because it’s November and NaNoWriMo or happenstance, I’ve heard a few tales of woe lately from writers whose hard drive crashed or, in one person’s case, had their laptop stolen. In each case, the writer did not have recent backups and lost what they were working on. My inner geek cringes to hear […]
