Family Matters

“Cyberpunk” has been much on my mind lately, or more accurately, in my face. I’ve received the usual batch of fall semester queries from students writing papers, a few more requests from various publishers seeking reprint and/or translation rights—one of which was worth taking seriously, so I did, and I’ll have more to say about that book when we get closer to the publication...

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A View from the Geek: Do Your Own Research Vs. Do Your Research • By Eric Dontigney

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels As a fiction writer, you must strive for verisimilitude. It’s the gold standard, that appearance of or resemblance to truth or reality. It’s even more important when you delve into speculative fiction. The more outrageous the story you plan to tell, in terms of breaks from understood physics, the more time you must spend grounding...

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Talking Shop: Eric's Writing Challenge Update 13

So, I meant to do this Friday and got caught up doing the work that pays the bills. Then, I meant to do this yesterday and got caught up doing the work that pays the bills and working on the book. So, here is the update. Better late than never.Let's start with the writing challenge.To date, I've written about 60,400 words toward the end goal of 87,500. That puts me about 69%...

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Status Update • 18 September 2021

 And another week flits past in the blink of an eye. More doctors, more clinics, more hospitals, more diagnostic work-ups: next week we find out whether this last cycle of thrice-daily infusions did the job and Karen can go back to normal chemotherapy or whether she needs another cycle of intravenous icannotbegintopronounceitin. The nasty bit is that this drug and her...

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Talking Shop: Eric's Writing Challenge Update 12

As per Wednesday's post on the perils of organic novel writing, this weeks Writing challenge update is a little weird. So, let the oddness being with the Writing Challenge itself.In theory, I wrote about 4000 words this last week. Great, right? Yeah, except no. The decision to split the space opera into two parts meant that, while most of what I'd written worked just fine,...

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Talking Shop: On the Perils of Organic Novel Writing • By Eric Dontigney

Photo by Philippe Donn from Pexels For the last few months, I’ve been posting on here about my Writing Challenge and appending those updates with one about my space opera, Rinn’s Run. I’d originally set a target length of about 100,000 words for Rinn’s Run. I picked that number because it’s more or less industry standard for science fiction novels. I’ll just write to order,...

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Write and Wrung Out • by Beth DeVore

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It must be September...

It must be September. The geese are flocking up in the cow pasture and beginning to work out their migration formations. The cranes and egrets have already left. The vegetables in the garden are ripe and ready for harvest, some of the more highly stressed trees are already beginning to turn colors and shed leaves, and the first of this semester’s new crop of “Dear Mr. Bethke”...

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Sunday, 5 September 2021

Hey. Even we need to take a weekend off once in a while. In the meantime, for your enlightenment, here’s one from the archives, circa 2018.Enjoy!~brb Recipe • 15-minute German Potato Salad • by Karen Bethke I love the smell of charcoal in the early evening. It smells like... Hubby’s cooking dinner! Which means that my job is to park myself in a comfty chair, with a...

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Talking Shop: Eric's Writing Challenge Update 11

Somewhere along the line, these updates migrated from every Friday all the way over to Monday. So, I'm going to try to correct that here with a second update this week.Let's start with the writing challenge. To date, I've racked up approximately 55,900 words toward the 87,500-word writing challenge goal. That puts me around 64% of the way there. I wrote about 3500 words...

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