Category: The Ohio Series

  • Trusting your characters to surprise you: 1400 words from Friday, reported a day late

    Trusting your characters to surprise you: 1400 words from Friday, reported a day late

    Writing yesterday went really well. I hit this awesome surprise, where one of my characters suddenly did something perfectly unexpected, showing up at my main character’s house with a cell phone video showing the impossible in action. It was exactly the weird and twisty wonderfulness that thrilled me, and made me laugh, and at the…

  • Fun, Joy, Surprises, and The Way You Want A Writing Day to Go

    Fun, Joy, Surprises, and The Way You Want A Writing Day to Go

    Some writing days are just wonderful, and amazing, and fun from beginning to end… and you have to appreciate them when you have them, because a lot of them aren’t. So this is me being joyfully grateful. In spite of the fact that I got nearly three thousand words today, I actually only wrote about…

  • Better and better — Ohio Novel 2 and 2377 words

    Better and better — Ohio Novel 2 and 2377 words

    I woke up this morning knowing how Ohio #2 needed to end. And today I jumped to all the way to Chapter 25, five chapters from the planned last Chapter 30, and started writing the necessary stuff to get the story to that ending. Tomorrow, I may drop back to chapter 12, and then write toward…

  • Pretty good day — Ohio Novel #2 Progress

    Pretty good day — Ohio Novel #2 Progress

    This morning, I increased my daily word-count goal to 1500 (up from 1250). This was a small change, and I’d been hitting that number pretty regularly anyway. So I decided to make it my regular objective. I came in just above that with 1532 words for the day.  Have a nice situation going on with…

  • Monday, and 1333 Words

    Monday, and 1333 Words

    Not a lot to say, but the wreckage of last week has now been cleared away, and I sat my ass down and wrote my book, and Ohio #2 is 1333 words closer to the finish line, with a total of 35,900 words down… In FIRST DRAFT, which is still a long way from done.…

  • Seven. But close to done.

    Seven. But close to done.

    At the moment, I don’t have much more to say than that. If I can get this last hill of shit shoveled, I will then be able to get some actual words today. If I get to my fiction before I run out of working hours, I’ll be starting at 34,298 words, with a writing…

  • Restarting Fiction Progress Updates

    To say that I’ve been absolutely shitty about keeping up with the blog would be too kind by half. I’ve been in Ohio now for a year and three months, more or less, and have written six posts since getting here. One of them was about my fiction progress. There have been some things that…

  • The Ohio Novel #1 Is Done! (Or what it’s like to disappear into a black box)

    The Ohio Novel #1 Is Done! (Or what it’s like to disappear into a black box)

    I wrapped up my final draft yesterday. In spite of best efforts, I came in over my 90,000K wordcount by about 12,000 words. I don’t have a title for the novel yet (Matt comes up with my best titles, and I’m really hoping he can pull out something amazing, both for the first book and…

  • Still kicking, still writing

    Still kicking, still writing

    So Ohio Novel #1 is pushing hard toward completion — or rather, I’m pushing hard and it’s fighting me all the way to the finish line. As I’ve discussed on the Alone In a Room with Invisible People podcast, having this book done doesn’t mean there’s going to be a new book. Not soon, anyway.…

  • First draft of The Ohio Series First Novel is DONE!  Includes FRIDAY SNIPPET

    First draft of The Ohio Series First Novel is DONE! Includes FRIDAY SNIPPET

    I did not expect to finish the first draft today. Thought it would take me a couple more days to get there, but while Becky and I were running ten-minute work sprints together, what had to be in there just clicked, two complete chapters flew off my fingertips, and all of a sudden, I have…