sci-fi author, beatmaker

Category: Fiction Writing Page 5 of 7

Boosting Word Counts – November Productivity Test

I’m in awe of authors who can crank out 5-10K words a day. And there are a lot of them out there. To achieve my own writing goals, I don’t necessarily need to achieve those heroic word counts. But I would like to bump up my productivity significantly.

Ideally, I’d like to consistently write at least 5000 thousand words a week. While that’s an order of magnitude less than many writers, those words still add up. If I can keep that pace up for at least ten months, I’m at 200K words per year. That’s a couple of novel’s worth, or four novellas, or forty short stories, or some combination thereof. (Of course, many of those words will end up deleted, or archived forever, so there’s something to be said for surplus words.)

Three Pillars of a Writing Career


Last year when visiting our journalist friend Eve Conant in D.C., I asked Eve for advice in getting my own writing career started. She passed on some advice that had been given to her at one point by a mentor, and that advice stuck with me. While I don’t remember her exact words, the gist of it was to think about building my writing career on three pillars:

Fiction Writing Update, Thoughts on Motivation and Incentive

First-generation self-driving truck

Two new fiction sales to announce:

My story “The Equationist” will be published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, either in the Jan/Feb issue or possibly the Mar/Apr issue. Publishing in this particular magazine has been a goal for a long time, mostly because I enjoy reading it so much, but also because the editor, C.C. Finlay, has always been generous with feedback, which is invaluable.

Getting in F&SF wasn’t easy … Finlay rejected nineteen stories before he accepted one.

Fiction Writing History and Update

Do we really need more books in the world? Yes. Yes we do.

In 2013, after fifteen years in the underground dance music industry, I got serious about writing fiction and made a real commitment to learn the craft. Since then I’ve worked on short stories or novels every day (either outlining/brainstorming, writing, or revising). Starting in late 2015 I started sending out short stories, and in May of 2016 my first published story appeared in Strange Horizons.

That’s the narrative I’d like you to believe, that I had good run making house music, running a record label, and being a nightclub promoter and then boom, I switched over to writing fiction and sold a story at a professional rate almost immediately.

The truth is messier, with lots of overlap, and many false starts.

Quality Control: Getting the Work Done Despite Your High Standards

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Over the last few years I’ve been compiling notes on good writing technique. My favorite authors have been generous with their advice, and I’ve been collecting it, analyzing it, and trying to apply it to my own work. How to build suspense, how to create relatable characters, how to construct a good sentence, a good scene, a good story.

Two problems …

Page 5 of 7

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