Category: How To Think Sideways

  • Writing the Novel: Math Hurts

    I’ve done the math on Dreaming the Dead, but it isn’t adding up to the kind of progress I want to see. This year, I’ve had The Silver Door come out in hardcover, The Ruby Key come out in paperback, and Hawkspar come out in paperback. And I had the short story “Light Through Fog”…

  • Think Sideways Is Up and Running

    I’m posting this a lot of places, because there’s one issue that I hadn’t counted on when shutting down the course so we could do upgrades. The new version requires members to check a box to receive critical e-mail updates (which is good, and will make my site host much happier)—BUT NO ONE has clicked…

  • My Birthday Bash: Presents for You

    Yeah, my birthday is almost here, and I decided this year to celebrate by giving presents to other people. And not just on my actual birthday, either. I’m giving away presents every day next week, plus a couple of presents starting today. So what are your presents? Day One (that’s today): Any two of my…

  • Light Through Fog

    I worked all weekend, and have been working nights for a while, in addition to working on the course. See, around the same time that I was getting ready to take How To Think Sideways live, I got this request for a short story from an editor who was putting together an anthology. That’s basically…

  • Breakthrough!

    I had the most amazing breakthrough today. Still writing the Think Sideways course, and was sitting in the little snack area in our local Target brainstorming the whole world-building/pre-planning process for novels (Lesson 7). My two guys were off looking for video games, and I had my carry-along notebook out and was drawing flow-charts, trying…

  • Not Dead. Definitely Swamped

    I hadn’t planned on the week following registration for How To Think Sideways being a week of troubleshooting all the many things that broke on the system software; thought we’d tested everything, but you only think that until a course goes live and real students start taking it. Anyway, this week I’m playing catch-up writing…

  • Bombarded by Writing

    C Breathes So I was sitting in the cafe in Books-A-Million waiting for my guys to finish doing Manly Things at Best Buy. I’d forgotten to bring knitting. I’d forgotten to bring my Think Sideways planning notebook. I’d forgotten to bring my “C” planning notebook. So I picked up a cheap-o notebook, and a pen…

  • Finished SILVER DOOR Write-In

    Tomorrow I’ll start on the type-in, but for today, I’m done, done, done! The write-in revision went well. The beta tester comments helped—folks found a lot of the same issues my editor found, as well as a few things that didn’t bother her, but bothered me. I managed to cover both bits of ground. No…

  • How Thinking Sideways is Different Than A Whack On The Side of The Head

    I’m doing this as a separate post because I figured it was going to be invisible in comments. (Where I originally answered the question.) Here’s the question I got: KalevTait Says: April 13th, 2008 at 12:09 pm I don’t know how related it is, but you might want to look at ‘A whack on the…

  • How To Think Sideways

    http://howtothinksideways.com/ Comments? Questions? Wish list?