Category: Writing
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Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 4)
Well, it's done. I beefed it up by nearly a third and sent it out to my agent. I hope it finds a home. One thing which expanding Corsair has allowed me to do is to give the minor characters more spotlight time. One of them — Anne Rogers — got promoted from a secondary…
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Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 3)
In my previous posts about Corsair, I mentioned that I have to expand my first draft to make it a proper book-sized book. Doing that revealed a structural problem. The original short story "The Barbary Shore" had extensive flashback sections, since it was simultaneously about Captain Santiago of Orbital Command battling Captain Black the Space…
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Battleship (Part 3): Aliens
I write science fiction. A lot of my stories have alien beings in them. I like to think I'm pretty good at creating aliens and alien civilizations. Which is why I am developing an irresistible urge to drive out to California and shout at every screenwriter who has used aliens in a film during the…
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Battleship (Part 2): What Could Have Been
I'm going to continue posting my reactions to watching the movie Battleship. Today I want to talk about a startling thought I had when it ended: It could have been a good movie. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that it began as a much better movie than it ultimately became. I don't have…
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Battleship (Part 1): Not Stupid Enough
My family recently rented the awful big-budget action movie Battleship, which of course was based on the board game. I learned a great deal from watching Battleship, mostly about things that I don't like. Today I'll talk about the first thing that bugged me: stupidity. Battleship was stupid — in a Facebook comment I said…
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Where I Do It
I do most of my writing in coffeeshops. Fortunately, I live in an area with a good assortment of places. In Greenfield I can go to Greenfield Coffee, which is a dedicated coffeehouse so I don't have to feel guilty about occupying a table during lunchtime. The chief drawback is that the town of Greenfield…
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Gamemaster Appeal
There are any number of books and Web sites providing aspiring roleplaying game referees with hints on how to make a campaign appealing to players. The best is probably Robin's Laws, even though the author had to overcome being Canadian. But just recently I was jotting down some ideas for campaigns I'd like to run,…
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Five Stories That Changed Everything: My Picks
A bit more than a week ago I drove to Boston in order to attend the venerable Boskone convention, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. As always, I spent a lot of my time either being on panels discussing things, or watching other people on panels discussing things. This year one of the most…
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Sweringen and Spaceships
This past Thanksgiving I ventured to southern Maryland for a big family dinner. My host happened to live just up the road from St. Mary's City, the site of Maryland's first colonial capital. It's a very interesting site: there are reconstructions of some of the original buildings and some excellent exhibits about how archaeologists combine…
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Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 2)
As I mentioned previously, Corsair had its origin in a short story for a pirate-themed anthology. So when I began to expand it into a novel, one of my guiding principles was that it had to remain a pirate story — even though it's about a nerdish spacecraft hijacker 17 years in the future. This…
