Posts Tagged ‘My Writing’

Having Something to Say

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m hav­ing a lot of luck writ­ing words lately.  There’s just one prob­lem;  they’re not meet­ing my rig­or­ous qual­ity stan­dards out the gate.

I’m torn between want­ing to be a good writer and a paid one.  Is there a dif­fer­ence?  Can you live on $10,000 every 5 years?  Quality takes time, and time is money.  The two are not mutu­ally exclu­sive, but they don’t nec­es­sar­ily go hand-​​in-​​hand.  If I am forced to choose my cri­te­ria for suc­cess, it would be a large fan­base and prof­itable projects  enough to keep me in the lifestyle I have come to expect. You know, vis­it­ing the den­tist once every ten years and trav­el­ing to con­ven­tions every five.

Like most every other aspir­ing writer you know, I wouldn’t mind mak­ing a liv­ing from my efforts.  Actually, when busi­ness is good on the free­lance web front, I’m not that con­cerned about it.  When busi­ness is weak like it has been lately, I’m all “OMG, gotta write six short sto­ries and try to sell them all.”  Because short fic­tion is so profitable.

No, I know, short fic­tion isn’t going to pay the bills.  And that would be why I wrote a deeply flawed novel this month!

I’m con­flicted a lot about what I’m turn­ing out because I’m not sure that what I have to say mat­ters.  I don’t always even know what I want to say.  Since col­lege, I have this deep sense that I live too much on sur­face thoughts.  Critical think­ing and form­ing of deeply held opin­ions isn’t some­thing I get up to as much as I did when I was younger.    My thoughts rarely go beyond “how can I pay the rent next month with­out dip­ping into sav­ings?”  I don’t spend a lot of time pon­der­ing free­dom vs. secu­rity or what it means to be grow­ing older in a soci­ety that increas­ingly val­ues youth above all other per­sonal traits. (Freedom prob­a­bly, and “it sucks”.  Now where’s my Nobel?)

You have to do some deep think­ing in order to form the opin­ions that are the core of “hav­ing some­thing to say.”  Especially if you plan on offer­ing any kind of unique insight.  For instance, “mur­der is bad” is a lit­tle played out.  However, “mur­der is okay when it’s a clown” is, ignor­ing the moral impli­ca­tions of such a mes­sage, at least some­what original.

So I’m work­ing on that.  I’m also back to think­ing a lot about sto­rycraft.  Because I don’t always know what to do next when I write a story. I don’t know implic­itly what makes a suc­cess­ful story, at its core.

What I’d like to do in the next year is learn story.  Learn my craft, so that I can focus less on “how do I end this story so it feels sat­is­fy­ing?” and more on hav­ing some­thing more to say.   I keep com­ing back to this issue of sto­rycraft.   I know I can do it by acci­dent. I would just like to be able to do it consistently.

I want to be the depend­able writer edi­tors can count on in a pinch.   I want to be the guy you go to for an odd anthol­ogy theme, know­ing that you’re going to get some­thing fresh and enter­tain­ing.  I  don’t want to be boxed into a par­tic­u­lar sub­genre (epic fan­tasy, hard SF, etc).  Like I am in a more broad sense, I want to be a gen­er­al­ist when it comes to the things I write about.

I actu­ally really want to write on-​​spec nov­els.  I want to play in other uni­verses not my own.   I want to write for video games. I want to write comics.  Screenplays. I even want to write more nonfiction.

Do you have tips for mas­ter­ing story?  How to make those choices in the course of a story to make it have that “oomph” in the end that makes a reader value the time they spent inside your head?  Share them in the comments.

Ten years into my writ­ing and I still feel like a jour­ney­man at best.   The most impor­tant trait of being a writer some­times feels like stubbornness.

Now Recruiting for the First Reader Brigade

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

story-recruitment

The Pitch

My writ­ing career is in full swing again, and that’s some­thing to be excited about.  I’m going places, I tells ya.  Unfortunately, I don’t get things quite right on the first draft, which means I need help from keen-​​eyed read­ers such as your­self.   That’s right, I’m not per­fect.  I know it’s a shock to hear, but let’s keep it together.  I might not be per­fect, but you can play a part in help­ing me look that way.

What I Need From You

I need your sweet, deli­cious braaaaai­iin… to look over my early drafts of sto­ries.    I’ll email you and the other First Reader Brigade mem­bers copies of sto­ries in MS Word or RTF for­mat.   What you send back can be any­thing from a sim­ple one line, “didn’t like this because [rea­son]” to detailed line edits or multi-​​page cri­tique.  I’m happy for either.  Basically, I need raw feed­back to improve my work. The First Reader Brigade are stal­wart defend­ers of the read­ing pub­lic mak­ing sure that my worst schlock is never foisted upon their pure, untar­nished minds.

When I’m writ­ing short sto­ries, I pro­duce around one a week, some­times more.  When I’m writ­ing a book, I don’t send any­thing out at all for long peri­ods of time.  Until the book is ready.  Then you get a really big file.

Here’s the impor­tant part.  If you agree to join the First Reader Brigade, you are NEVER oblig­ated to read or respond to any­thing in par­tic­u­lar.  Pick what inter­ests you, and only spare the time when you have it to spare.  I’ll never harass you about send­ing me feed­back unless you ask me to do that.  There’s no pres­sure in this Brigade.  Just opportunities.

My friend Jay Lake works on this model—another writer who pro­duces quite a bit, and I think it works for him.  Hopefully it will work for me too.

What You Get From Me

My undy­ing love and grat­i­tude for one.  For sec­ond, if you’re a writer, then I ask that you send me your own sto­ries for me to return the favor.  If you’re not a writer, I’ll owe you a favor.    That favor is yours to define.   Think of how you might exploit the hell out of that.  The only stip­u­la­tion I can put on it is that I would pre­fer you not ask me to build you web­sites for free.  I want feed­back, but I can’t trade my poten­tial income away for it.   That said… advice, lit­tle fixes of odd bro­ken things, no problem!

And if it’s remotely pos­si­ble for me to add an acknowl­edge­ments sec­tion to the pub­lished ver­sion, you will be in it, even if I have to bump my own mother to fit you.  Unless you are my mom, in which case, er, guess you get men­tioned twice?

How to Join

Email me at jeremy@​tuginternet.​com.  That’s not my main address, but it’s one I expect to get spam at, so I am post­ing it here.  If you have a dif­fer­ent address for me, use it, no wor­ries.  Just let me know you’re inter­ested, and I’ll put you on my auto mailer list.

If you were look­ing for­ward to read­ing TAKEDOWN NOTICE or “The God-King’s Right Hand” then this is how you’ll do it.

I’m really deter­mined to be the best writer I can be.  But I need your help to do it.  I can’t see my own mis­takes very clearly, but to you I’m prob­a­bly just one huge mis­take so this should be a cakewalk!

J.A. Pitts on the Necessity of Blindness

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My friend and client J.A.  Pitts has an inter­est­ing guest post on Grasping for the Wind today about some­thing I’ve recently learned:

The Necessity of Blindness is that aspect of a writer who can­not see the flaws in their work at first. I fin­ish a story, and send it to my first read­ers, pray­ing it holds together, that the begin­ning, mid­dle, and end all align to the point that the reader has a ful­fill­ing experience.

About one half of the way through my recent novel attempt (fin­ished last Saturday, by the way), I started to really worry about how bad it was.   I started to lose my blind­ness to the flaws and it really slowed me down (rel­a­tively speak­ing).  I got basi­cally “stuck” at a lull between ris­ing action arcs and was wor­ried that every­thing I was doing was just ter­ri­ble.  The voice in my head said “give up.”

Luckily, the voice in my head that demands I stick to my sched­ule was stronger this time around, and after some tin­ker­ing, I was able to power through it.

Right now, I’m still think­ing about the book a lot–mostly, again, how much it sucks.  I’m slowly build­ing a list of how I might go about fix­ing var­i­ous parts that I don’t like.   But I’m not edit­ing the book yet.  I’m wait­ing for my blind­ness to fall away, as John sug­gests, so that I can see the book more clearly.  I’m pretty sure it’ll be both as bad as not as bad as I expect.  But at least I’ll be able to see it clearly.

The End is Nigh; On Writing, Focus, and Determination

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

No, not the end­ing of all things in which Xenu returns and bat­tles a Scientologist-​​built Voltron piloted by John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, and Beck.  That’s sched­uled for sum­mer 2012.

The end­ing we’re talk­ing about today is that of writ­ing the final chap­ters of my first book.

I know, I’m dis­ap­pointed too.  But what are you going to do?

I wish I could tell you what changed a lit­tle over a month ago that broke my writer’s block.  Maybe my father’s death faded into the past finally enough that it didn’t haunt me any­more when I took to the key­board.  Maybe step­ping down from my anti-​​anxiety med­ica­tion allowed my brain to recover its sup­pressed cre­ativ­ity.  Wouldn’t that be a huge pain in the ear if we have to be anx­ious to be creative?

Or it could be that I finally learned how to cap­ture my focus.  I think it’s this one.

It’s no coin­ci­dence that the very first thing I did after get­ting my new MacBook was to install the Scrivener demo.  I’ve heard Mac-​​based authors gush­ing about this pro­gram for years, and so I wanted to check it out.  And I noticed this lit­tle but­ton called “full screen” mode. So I clicked it.

Have you ever been to an opera, or a ballet—some place where the audi­ence is incred­i­bly appre­cia­tive of the show?  And you’re sit­ting in the audi­ence and every­one is chat­ting and sud­denly the lights dim a bit.  And a hush rolls over the crowd.  A moment later, the music begins.  If you were an alien observ­ing the sit­u­a­tion, you might think it was the hush that sum­moned the music, and not the reverse.

That hap­pened in my brain when I opened up the “Full Screen” mode. I hadn’t real­ized how much any com­puter is a ball of dis­trac­tions to me.  Twitter, Facebook, IMs, emails, RSS updates.  I could spend my entire day feel­ing very pro­duc­tive deal­ing with all of the var­i­ous infor­ma­tion streams that I’ve set up for myself.  And you’d like that, wouldn’t you Twitter?  You minx.

The hush rolled over me and I heard a faint voice in the back of my brain, in the very back rows.  A crazy per­son began to shout—or, it would be more appro­pri­ate to say that he had always been shout­ing and I had been unable to hear him.

I brought him up on stage, and gave him the floor.  He con­ducted, and my fin­gers played.

BAM, I had a story that has trou­bled me for sev­eral years.  BAM, two more fol­lowed in quick suc­ces­sion.    I say BAM, but what I really mean is I spent sev­eral hours a day hid­ing in the cor­ner of a cof­fee shop to remove even the phys­i­cal dis­trac­tions of my home envi­ron­ment,  launched Scrivener, and worked.  But com­pared to the strug­gles of the past few years, the sto­ries were prac­ti­cally Athenian in nature.

I resolved rather quickly to ride this don­key as far as it would take me, and so far, I haven’t missed my count of a thou­sand words a day, although I got close a cou­ple of times last week when I had bad days unre­lated to the writ­ing. I even tried to give up and stop, but I felt so ill at the idea that I got out my lap­top at 11 PM despite being exhausted and I wrote sit­ting on the couch while my wife watched Glee.  Glee, for fuck’s sake!   If any­thing should have been able to assault my new­found focus, it would be that … show.

Most days, I do between three thou­sand to five thou­sand words, which is why I am right now 3 chap­ters away from fin­ish­ing a 60,000 word novel.  When you real­ize that I have been writ­ing at least 3 or 4 hours a day to man­age that, it prob­a­bly sounds a lot less impres­sive.   Still, I’ll take it.

It’s kind of a crap novel, if I’m being hon­est.  But it’s mine and I no longer doubt that I’m capa­ble of doing this.  This biggest ques­tion I have always faced has not been “can I write a good novel?”  but “can I write that many words at all?” And now I know I can.  I’ll have this draft wrapped up by Sunday or Monday at the latest.

As far as qual­ity, they say writ­ing is when you put words on the page, and edit­ing is when you make them good.  Unfortunately, I’m even worse at edit­ing than I am at writ­ing. But I am as pig­headed as… god, my brain is almost com­pletely devoid of analo­gies right now.  We’ll just say I am stub­born.  It was never a ques­tion of that, but of endurance. So I will beat the man­u­script with sticks until it sucks less.  And if that doesn’t work, then I will kill it with fire, piss on the ashes, and start a new one.  Because that’s how I roll now.

And yeah, I don’t know that I rec­om­mend to any­one else that you write a novel in 3 weeks.   Unless you want to; in which case I say, close this browser win­dow, unplug your inter­net, and start typ­ing.

Write like the devil is chas­ing you.  Write like you have ter­mi­nal can­cer.  Because you might.  You never know.   And if you don’t, then that in and of itself is a gift from the uni­verse, telling you, “make some­thing with this time you have.”

Write it now, write it hard, and write with­out fear or doubt.  Just jump.

It’s not the end of the world if you fall.  The land­ing is almost always a soft one.  But don’t be sur­prised if you start flap­ping your arms.  Frantic at first, then with pur­pose, and before you hit, you take flight.

And if you don’t, then there’s always paint­ing, or music. Or sex.  Awwwww yeah.

New Story and New Article

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Here’s a quick note to say that I have two new pieces of writ­ing out in the world this month for your read­ing plea­sure.  The first is one of my all-​​time favorite short sto­ries, “Work, With Occasional Molemen”:

I blinked in the sud­den bright light, and so did the three mole men who were slumped at drunken angles on my futon. Frozen pizza boxes and emp­ties lit­tered the floor. One of them hic­cupped. A sec­ond barfed all over my throw rug with a loud spat­ter­ing sound. The third, and most familiar-​​looking, made a groan­ing sound like the gate of an old aban­doned church­yard and waved a paw weakly in my direction.

I stared at the scene for a few sec­onds longer. Worked my jaw a lit­tle to keep it from lock­ing up. “Screw it,” I finally said, and stomped back up stairs. It was more than I could deal with right after a six­teen hour shift.

You can read that here over at Giganotosaurus, which has run some amaz­ing fic­tion so far.  I’m really proud to be part of the exper­i­ment in pub­lish­ing longer works online.  Fun fact:  this is by far the longest thing I have ever writ­ten at about 12,000 words.  I hope you enjoy it.  Don’t say a word to nobody if you don’t, or the mole­men will get you…

Second, if you buy the ebook edi­tion, you can read my fun arti­cle “Five Animals That Will Take Over the World After We Eradicate Ourselves,” in the January issue of Lightspeed Magazine.  If you aren’t hip to the ereader thing or can’t afford the issue, you can wait until the 25th to read it on the website!

What Keeps You From Writing?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

December 2 Writing.
What do you do each day that doesn’t con­tribute to your writ­ing — and can you elim­i­nate it?
(Author: Leo Babauta)

Yeah, so I’m behind on the cal­en­dar on these.  At some point, I’ll do a day that catches up on all of them. Anyway, to the prompt.

At first, I thought I would be a smart ass and write “sleep­ing” but when I gave it a moment’s thought I real­ized that my dreams con­tribute sign­f­i­cantly to my writ­ing.  So the sad truth is that I have to admit that play­ing video games is the main thing that doesn’t con­tribute to my writ­ing.  Lately, espe­cially, given my mild EVE Online addic­tion I’ve devel­oped.  There’s some­thing really appeal­ing about how I can send my money out to make more money in that game.  It would be great if in real life I get enough money to do that.  I guess they call that invest­ing.  It has the mak­ings of a fun game for me.  Well, it is a fun game as part of EVE.

Can I elim­i­nate it?  Should I?  I can def­i­nitely cut back, but I also need to allow myself down time.  While I play, my mind wan­ders, and giv­ing my brain a chance to wan­der helps make sure it doesn’t get too worn down.  So no, I’m not going to elim­i­nate it.  But I am going to start lim­it­ing my time.  Perhaps no more than 10 hours a week, or some­thing along those lines.  This will require some con­certed thought.  Perhaps while clear­ing out a Guristas nest.

Actually, I’ve been think­ing that my sud­den EVE play­ing might be an extinc­tion burst designed by my sub­con­scious to keep me from mov­ing for­ward on my novel.  I’m still work­ing on the book. I have given myself a dead­line to have a work­ing out­line by Jan 1.   Let’s see now if I can stick to it.

Pro Tip: Online Games and You

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Don’t pick up a new (or even old) mas­sively mul­ti­player online game over the week­end when you’re plan­ning on get­ting writ­ing done.  Or read­ing. Or work.  Or any laun­dry.  Or, okay, bathing.

This obses­sion should burn out in  a week or so, leav­ing only self-​​loathing and despair.  But it’s fun to fly around the galaxy pre­tend­ing to be a hard­ened explorer, seek­ing out unsta­ble worm­holes and lost alien techol­ogy, for the time being.

Is it a com­mon thing for writ­ers to get sucked into MMOs?  I sure see a lot of peo­ple on Twitter talk­ing about World of Warcraft.  How about you?

And yes, for those keep­ing track, this is my 3rd return to EVE Online.

On Formulaic Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Besides over-​​sleeping enough to be deeply annoyed with myself, I’ve been read­ing a lot and plan­ning a novel.  I was just in a book­store for the first time since I got my iPad in order to buy a copy of Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass.  I’ve read it once before, as a library check­out, but I’d for­got­ten most of what I learned. Buying the book, along with a lot of ques­tions I’ve been ask­ing on Twitter, all serve to the same goal of find­ing a crutch to help me get through the process.

I’ve started and aban­doned novel projects a cou­ple of times.  The longest thing I ever wrote was in Africa, before I even started “writ­ing” proper, and I think it came in around 40,000 words or so. I was just writ­ing to kill time at that point, and when I had very lit­tle else to do, it wasn’t too hard to man­age.  Also, I didn’t know any­thing, wasn’t aware that I didn’t know any­thing, so it was easy to do.  No pressure.

I’ve been think­ing a lot about my long term future lately.  I’m start­ing to think that there’s a chance I might live past my 40s, and I’m not con­fi­dent that I can still be per­son­ally build­ing web­sites at 50.  It’s a young man’s game, and while I hope Clockpunk Studios to be alive and well still at that point, I just know I can’t be doing this.  So I’m try­ing to plan for the future.

I’ve done a lot of soul search­ing lately and I think I would very much like to make a con­sid­er­able por­tion of my liv­ing writ­ing.  And the only way that’s going to have even a chance of hap­pen­ing is by writ­ing nov­els.  So I’m set­ting aside short sto­ries and work­ing to fig­ure out my process for novels.

Back to for­mu­las.  I know I can write. I’m com­fort­able with my base­line skill at this point.  I’ve sold enough short sto­ries to con­vince myself, yes, I know how to write at least a lit­tle.  I’m just not sure I can write any­thing so sus­tained.  So I’m look­ing for struc­tures that can help me break down a novel into sizes and bits I can under­stand, with­out turn­ing it into a series of loosely con­nected short stories.

So I’ve been col­lect­ing for­mu­las, advice, and what not, all while I fill up a word file with ideas, imagery, bits and pieces that I want to go into this first novel.  I’m try­ing not to put any pres­sure on myself.  I want the whole process to be fun, and I’m excited about the idea at the moment.

So far, I’ve collected:

I need rules to fol­low, a struc­tural guide.  At the very least so I can know what rules there are to break.  It’s a whole new ball game.  One that takes a ter­ri­fy­ingly long time to play.  But here I go anyway.

Stop Worrying About Subgenre

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s been an awful lot of chat­ter around the web lately about sub­gen­res and steam­punk in par­tic­u­lar.  We’ve seen attacks on steam­punk, defenses of steam­punk, and a thou­sand shades of opin­ion in-​​between.  As some­one who likes steam/​clockpunk enough to name his busi­ness after it, I have a dog in the fight.

But I’m not drawn to these discussions.

Genre in gen­eral, as far as I am con­cerned, is mostly a con­struct of mar­ket­ing. Booksellers care about them, and the read­ers do too, but I ques­tion how much it helps an author to con­sciously choose a genre or sub­genre.  Right now, I feel bad for any­one writ­ing a steam­punk novel, because steam­punk is clearly, at least to my eyes, reach­ing a sat­u­ra­tion point rivaled only by zom­bies.  To be on that bus, you needed to write and sell your steam­punk novel 2–3 years ago.  I’m sure we’re going to con­tinue to see nov­els from estab­lished authors in this vein, but it wouldn’t sur­prise me if edi­tors and agents are already mov­ing on in their search for the next big thing.

My advice to you, and to myself, is to ignore the sub­genre when you write.  You can ignore that advice and still be suc­cess­ful (of course). I know, for exam­ple, that John Scalzi set out delib­er­ately to write mil­i­tary SF because it seemed to be sell­ing well, but I won­der what we would have got­ten from him if he had set out to write his own sub­genre.  Scalzian fic­tion, we would call it, prob­a­bly.  What would it look like? Who knows.  It’d prob­a­bly have fart jokes though! (and I mean that in a pos­i­tive way)

That’s not to say that if your pas­sion is steam­punk, I think you shouldn’t write a steam­punk novel. By all means, punk away.  This post once again boils down to “don’t lis­ten to oth­ers and write what you love.”

But I think this advice espe­cially holds true when it comes to labels.  Labels are for mar­ket­ing and that comes later.  Right now, when you’re still string­ing words together and shap­ing a book just seems like the wrong time to get caught up in such thoughts.  It’s not the sub­gen­res that exist today that get me excited.  I’m exited to won­der just what weird, wild, and expres­sive forms and gen­res writ­ers are work­ing on right now, as we speak, that we’ve never seen before.  I can’t wait to see what they turn out to be.  Regardless of where they are shelved in the bookstore.

Things You Should Buy and Read

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Plug, The First:  One Click Banishment

image I have a new story out titled “One Click Banishment” in Way of the Wizard and you can read it online for free!  As you can see from the cover, you have to buy this anthol­ogy.  If not because I am in it and my story is awe­some, then because holy­fuck­ing­shit look at all those names on the cover.

This is the sec­ond story set in a world where young, geeky wiz­ards  secretly share and pirate magic over bit tor­rent sites, work­ing to wrest the con­trol of magic from the stodgy old Magical Association of Atlantis, aka MAA, or Big Mother.  The pre­vi­ous story was also pub­lished by JJA in a pirate-​​themed issue of Shimmer.  If you’re look­ing to read that one first, you have a cou­ple of options over on my bib­li­og­ra­phy page.

These sto­ries are excuses for me to trot out var­i­ous kinds of nerdy knowl­edge.  I was very much inspired by the kinds of stuff that Cory Doctorow writes when I write these. I have a title for a third one I’m think­ing about writ­ing, “The Beast From Port 666.” 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one!  If you do, tell your friends. If you don’t, DON’T TELL NOBODY.

Second: Genevieve Valentine’s First Novel

I’ve been a big fan of Genevieve Valentine ever since I first started read­ing her hilar­i­ous reviews in var­i­ous places around the web.  I wasn’t sur­prised at all to find out later that she was an accom­plished fic­tion writer as well.  Her short sto­ries have been uni­formly excellent.

This past week at World Fantasy, I had the plea­sure of hear­ing Genevieve read from her work not just once, but twice.  First, she read from her upcom­ing novel, Mechanique.

Wow. The read­ing blew my socks off, and I com­menced to beg Genevieve for an advance copy of it.  I didn’t want to wait to read the rest of it.  I wanted to read it on the spot.  It’s steam­punky with­out being annoy­ing like I’m find­ing so much steam­punk lately (partly the rea­son I haven’t done any Dr. Roundbottom in so long), and it’s got a cir­cus in it for God’s sake!  You gotta get this one pre­ordered, and luck­ily, you can, because it’s up on Amazon already.

The sec­ond read­ing was from the fan­tas­tic Living Dead 2, an amaz­ingly beau­ti­ful zom­bie story set on Coney Island (I think).  Genevieve knocked this one out of the park as well. 

Get in on the ground floor before she’s hugely suc­cess­ful. This way, you can tell all your friends, when you’re wait­ing in line for her to sign your book, that you liked Valentine’s work before it was cool to like it.

Plug Finale: The Mostly True Story of Jack

God damn, was this past year’s Launchpad work­shop full of amaz­ingly tal­ented peo­ple or what?  I mean, you had the multi-​​talented (but sadly accident-​​prone as of late) nov­el­ist and comics writer Marjorie M. Liu, and Genevieve, and JJA, Monte freak­ing Cook, a fan­tas­tic games writer—I have to stop here before I just gush all over the inter­net. And Kelly Barnhill, whose new book I’m about to talk about now.

I man­aged to hear a great read­ing by Kelly this week­end as well.  I’m not one for mid­dle grade fic­tion usu­ally, but this read­ing was so unique and inter­est­ing that I’m eagerly look­ing for­ward to pick­ing it up. The Mostly True Story of Jack has this lovely mid­west­ern feel that I find so rarely in books for younger read­ers.  The writ­ing crack­les with play­ful­ness, and Kelly’s read­ing sold it all very nicely.  Go, pre­order both these books!

I always come back from these con­ven­tions so charged with excite­ment and this year was no excep­tion.  I also heard great read­ings by Vylar Kaftan Jeffrey Ford, and even JJA him­self read­ing from a cou­ple of sto­ries in The Living Dead 2 as well.  There’s so much great work being done.  I wish I were inde­pen­dently wealthy and could spend all my time read­ing all this great work by oth­ers.  And maybe squeez­ing a word or two of my own out from time to time.

Maybe I should cut down on the TV a bit and get a lit­tle more read­ing done.  We’ll see.