Well, look what I found stuffed in the back of a drawer behind some outdated cell phone cords, a keyring full of keys that don’t unlock anything in my house, and expired pack of batteries. It’s my blog! It was a little tricky to find. It turns out I’d let the domain name lapse. Oops.

On top of that, apparently the rules for pictures changed at some point and a bunch of my old content got blocked or at least mangled. A bunch? Ok, there was never a bunch here.

I missed the New Years Resolution posting this year where I vow to do a better job keeping up this site. Actually, I missed it last year as well. I won’t insult either of us with empty promises like that. I will, however, declare my intention to redo the aesthetics of this page and try to make it something I want to post on again, and hopefully something you’ll want to read. I also have a few things I’d like to talk about. For instance:

• Out of Chaos publishing imprint
• Kindle Vella and my upcoming serial there
• Evidence that I still know how to write (to convince you and me)
• Shows, movies, and games I just need to express opinions on

That’s just a few to remind me what I want to do here. There are plenty more ruminating in the back of my brain.

Don’t worry, I know no one is reading this right now. It’s been dead for what, two and a half years? But maybe you’ve stumbled across this in the future. Consider this the blog’s Christopher Eccleston phase (yes, a Doctor Who reference). I’m not abandoning all the content that came before on this blog, but I’m creating a solid new starting point so I can start accumulating new fans. To my old fans that find this, thank you both for dropping by.

So let’s see if I can reestablish a web presence for myself as a writer. Check my bibliography for a list of my published stories. I’m sure you can find a few of them for free online somewhere (I particularly recommend the audio stories on Escape Pod). In the meantime, keep an eye on this page. It might be changing a bit, hopefully for the better. That includes updating that market list and my workshop page. For now, thanks for stopping by! See you soon.

I’m a teacher by profession. Except there’s not much going on in the education world right now. Our country hasn’t gone to fill scale distance learning, though I do have some optional assignments on my website (yes, optional math assignments) and I have some students working to recover pervious failing grades. Keeping up with that isn’t exactly a full time gig right now. So I have all the time in the world to write.

I bet you know whether this is going. It’s not that I’m getting no writing done. I’ve done more in the past two weeks than I have in any pair of weeks in a long time. But it’s not a full time writing good either. It could be. It should be. But damn, items hard to do it.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

I have three things to blame this on: interruptions, atrophy, and weirdness.

The interruptions are simultaneously the least of the problems and the worst of the problems. It never fails, once I get going at the keyboard, something needs to be done. Dinner needs to be made or dishes need to be done or shopping needs to be done (which feels like wandering into a zombie apocalypse…but that’s later) or the lawn needs to be moved or my kid needs to be ferried to or from her mother’s house. All of these are my normal household take, but somehow they always stroke when I’m trying to get writing done. Oh, and lately there have been a bevy of school emails, many from students and parents at just whatever hour. Part of this is that I’m always about to start typing. The other issue is that writing isn’t my “real job” so it can be interrupted for other things. I never have to interrupt a lecture to make dinner or a quiz to more the lawn. Part of this is that others (not pointing fingers, babe) think this way about my writing. The bigger issue is that I feel this way about it. I talk a big game about making writing my fill time job until schools open up again, but I’m not there mentally yet. This is a battle of willpower that I simply need to keep fighting and gaining ground in.

By atrophy I mean that, just like it’s hard to hop into a marathon after younger spent several years on the couch, so too is it hard to write for extended times when I haven’t been flexing those muscles much at all. Writing is hard. Sometimes I forget that. It requires work and talent and more work. My endurance is low; I can’t stay focused on a completely separate reality for more than about thirty minutes before my concentration starts to crumble. Again, this is something I need to work at, just like if were working up to marathon shape again. (Ha! Again?)

Then there’s the weirdness. The when-will-the-world-go-back feeling that permeates every waking moment these days. The sense that going to the supermarket is an act if risking your life or the lives of the other shoppers. Even weirder was the day I went to Lowe’s for gardening supplies and found half the city already there, half of them acting like nothing was different. Even in sci-fi and fantasy, I feel like nothing I write could be stranger than what I’m living. There are moments when I can do nothing but sit and shudder when I consider the scope of the changes the world is experiencing and wondering which changes (or speculating new ones) will become permanent. Gas prices? Probably not. The stock market? I hope not. Layoffs? I shudder to think. But this distraction isn’t something I’m going to get over. It will eventually pass, but not soon. But it’s okay to be overwhelmed by overwhelming stuff. I just need to remind myself of this. Often.

So what was the point of this post? Threefold, I guess. 1) I needed to get these thoughts out of my head and written someplace so I can deal with them. 2) To let people know that, if they are feeling these distractions when trying to write or paint or create or improve, they aren’t alone. They aren’t weird or weak or inferior for their struggles. And 3), hoping others out there will respond to help reinforce the fact that I’m not alone in these distractions either.

Thanks for listening, er, reading. But now I need to get to bed. I have writing to do tomorrow. And mowing. But mostly writing.

Nothing like a global pandemic and three weeks off work to make you take a look at your life.

The last time I posted to this blog was November, 2017. My last story sale was longer ago than that. Every time I refer to myself as a writer these days I have to check whether my nose grew. I haven’t been much of one. Teaching, parenting, and husbanding have taken up the lion’s share of my time, with a new hobby of Dungeons & Dragons slurping up what puddles remain. I have a lot more excuses than I have keyboard hours. That’s no way to be a writer.

So what brings me here in 2020? A sudden abundance of free time. Hopefully I’m not the only one socially distancing himself for the good of slowing down COVID-19’s plundering of the world. So what’s a guy to do when he has three weeks away from his day job? Put in some hours with his night job, of course. No, not fighting crime. Writing!

The two and a half years since I last blogged haven’t been completely devoid of writing. I’ve tinkered on some stories, even sent a few out to add to my rejection pile. I’ve started sponsoring my school’s Creative Writing Club, too, which has been incredibly rewarding and probably owed a lot of credit for my fingers finding the keyboard today. I’ve done a few panels at a few Cons. All of those things are more writer-adjacent though. Writers do one thing: write. That hasn’t been happening.

Even this blog post isn’t really writing. Nor is the vicious word-assassination I’ve engaged in to pare down two 750-word stories to 500 for the upcoming Escape Pod Flash Fiction Contest (improving one, making the other look like a toddler that cut her own hair). Nor is the tiny bit of editing I did to the novelette I just sent to one of the few magazines that still accepts that length. (Did I call it a novella in my cover letter? Oops.) They are, however, writing-adjacent tasks that I wanted to get off my plate so I could hit my writing with both barrels over the next couple weeks of social isolation.

Let’s face it, I’ve taken more than one look at my life this week and wondered if I’m on the last chapter. I don’t think so: I’m young-ish and healthy-ish. Even if I catch the virus, it’s unlikely to be the end of me. That doesn’t stop a man from looking back and considering if he’s been enough. I’ll admit, I’ve had a pretty good run. Great kid, fantastic wife, eighteen years of teaching, a couple dozen published stories…

But that last one doesn’t satisfy. Ten years ago, I was a “Writer of the Future”. Well it’s the future now. Heck, the grocery stores look like we’re in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, so it must be the future. How am I less a writer now than I was then?

This is where the excuses come in, but mostly it’s that I haven’t prioritized writing in my daily life. Now when I look at the big tapestry, that writing part is missing. Or it’s a few threads where I was intending a prominent feature.

So here I am, at the loom of life overdoing this metaphor on my blog — my writer blog. Tomorrow morning I’ll be back at this keyboard working on a story, writing new words, new pages, new chapters. I didn’t give up on being a writer. Unfortunately it took a disaster to remind me of that. I’m going to focus on getting a book published before we have another one of these come through. Then it can be my book that people reach for when the hoarders get all the toilet paper. (Why, what have you been using?)

My November is off to a resounding silence. I had such great plans for why my NaNoWriMowas going to be a success this year (see last post). As it turns out, none of those reasons were worth anything.

My goal to tackle the novel I didn’t write last year has been significantly derailed by opportunities with deadlines. So I should (and will) just write those instead, right? Well, I started to do that, but realized the story I was working on didn’t quite fit with the dark-sf/f theme of the opportunity, so I abandoned that project the same way I abandoned my novel.

Then I realized that I should just write on my novel while I let another darker idea brew in my head. So, of course, the moment I focused on the novel again, dark story ideas rained down upon me. At first I was thinking of a spaceship-based locked room scenario, though the plot was slow in forming. So I figured I should watch a dark locked-room spaceship movie to help jiggle some ideas loose. I watched Life. Best film I’ve seen in that genre since Aliens…but it convinced me that I shouldn’t write such a story because I’d only end up copycatting.

But mu mind was rolling and I just hand-wrote a two page outline for a story idea that I am very excited about. It’s dark, convoluted, and weird — exactly the stuff I was looking for. Unfortunately it may also be a novel rather than a short story/novelette as my opportunity’s word limit requires. Ugh.

But at least this means I have something to write now. Better a late WriMo than a never WriMo, right? Alas, day job requirements will have me tied up most of tomorrow, and likely a lot more over the next week or two. Still, I have a new nowhere-near-50k-word goal of finishing the first draft of this story by the end of the month. When life gives you lemons, write a dark time travel story for a themed anthology.

It’s Halloween. That’s pretty scary, since that means NaNoWriMo starts…tomorrow. [insert horror movie scream here]

I didn’t decide that I’m participating in NaNo this year until…oh, about an hour ago. I have a lot of writing I need to do — some on various projects, so I’m not sure that I’ll be giving full attention to my official project, but if I give attention to the keyboard, that’s a win. For me anyway.

I haven’t “won” NaNo in quite a while. I asked myself several times why I think this year will be any different. Here are my theories that I think could contribute to this year’s success:

1. I’m dieting. I’m just getting started (again) on Weight Watchers. Which means I’m going to need a distraction while I’m at home so I don’t shove my hand in the proverbial cookie jar. So every time I want a snack, I’ll divert that to writing time. Will it work? Here’s hoping.
2. I’m married! Okay, I was married before. In fact, I was married the last time I was a NaNo winner. Unfortunately that was largely because I was using keyboard time as a distraction while I counted down to the end of the holidays to pursue a divorce. This is NOT the situation this year. Earlier this month, I married an amazing woman who is very supportive of me and my writing. She’s going to help me get my daily writing time in…as long as I don’t neglect too many chores in the process.
3. My kid really wants me to write this book. This is a book inspired by her and my dog (an idea I was supposed to write last year but still hasn’t gotten off the ground). That and she’s big enough to fend for herself when Dad is typing.
4. I‘m embracing the get-words-on-the-page philosophy. I have a bad habit of getting distracted by wanting pretty words or just the right word. Recently the old adage of “you can’t edit what you haven’t written” has struck home with me and my fingers are ready to get words on the screen. That’s a good state of mind for NaNo.

So those are my theories. We’ll see how well they work out. And if I only get 10,000 or 20,000 instead of 50,000, I’m okay with that. It’s about upping my (largely static) output.

Good luck to everyone participating. Here we go.

Yay, LibertyCon is this weekend!

Boo, my tooth is killing me. Apparently it’s an abscessed root or some such thing. What that means is that I’ve spent the last two days pacing around the house and moaning with an ice pack on my face or a frozen washcloth in my mouth or medicated. It has been miserable. Today hasn’t been as bad; apparently a sign that the antibiotics are doing their job.

Still, the tooth has defeated me and I won’t make LibertyCon. 😦 I didn’t want to go and be miserable. I didn’t want to play wait and see until it was too late to cancel the hotel room. So I’m out. I think I’ve been to the last five LibertyCons and I had no interest in missing one anytime soon, but agony is hard to contend with. I’ll be going to a dentist (not my dentist; he’s on vacation) to at least begin treatment (root canal) tomorrow at about the same time that my first panel was supposed to begin. I assure you that I’d rather be discussing short story structure than staring up with my mouth open at a masked, drill-wielding stranger.

To all of you attending LibertyCon, have fun. I’ll be there next year.

At long last it is summer, boys and girls. And for full-time teacher, part-time writers like me, that means the keyboard is calling. Thank goodness I’m not house-hunting like I was last summer, or job hunting like the summer before that. Maybe I can actually get some writing accomplished!

I’ve been pecking away at an old, half-finished draft of a NaNoWriMo project from five years ago. It’s a mess, but it’s a first draft. If I can make it a complete first draft, then I can start un-messing it with the magic of revision. I’ve made a couple chapters’ progress, so it’s something.

I also stumbled around the internet enough to find that it’s flash contest season at the Escape Artist Podcasts, specifically their fantasy cast, PodCastle. I’ve sold a couple stories to their sci-fi sister, Escape Pod, but not in a long time. My flash story “Chips” (still unpublished) fared quite well in the 2016 Escape Pod flash contest, slipping into the final round but falling flat there.

I have high hopes for this little fantasy flash this time around. It’s based on a story I wrote for a Codex Weekend Warrior, but it had to be stripped and reworked to fit the contest’s very slim 500-word limit. No, I’m not telling you anything about my story. That would be against the rules. You’ll just have to go read them yourself, vote on the best ones, and hope that means mine. Voting starts July 1st.

I’ve also been re-listening to what I’ve decided is my favorite book, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. It’s long (make that looooong), but it’s excellent. Why isn’t HBO pounding down Sanderson’s door to make this their follow-up to Game of Thrones? No, not enough sex for HBO (read: none), but someone should be making this and a single movie wouldn’t do it justice. Heck, a single season would have a hard time encompassing it. But I digress… The third book in the series — Oathbringer — is due out this November and I wanted to refresh my memory of the first two books. I should be finished listening to both by November. I’d never find time to read them both before then, but audio books are great while I drive, while I mow, while I do dishes. And listening to Sanderson’s expert craftsmanship really inspires me to write, though it reminds me how very much revision my work in progress will need. But first I need a finished draft.

And now that we’ve come full circle, I’ll end so I can go write.