My Agent Told Me To Make A Blog

I need to take a minute to air some grievances here. Apologies if this comes across more curmudgeony than usual. Since I've started blogging again and trying to learn social media, I've cruised through a lot of author blogs. As far as the "everyman" sort of blog goes, those written by my peers in similar situations to myself, I'm getting awfully disillusioned. There are, of course, some very helpful and inspiring blogs out there, and I'm also not talking about the websites of agents or extremely successful authors, like, I don't know, Neil Gaiman or somebody. But a lot of the I'm-an-aspiring-or-newly-self-published-author type of blogs do a very good job of making sure I don't come back. I won't touch on layout or ease of navigation today. While that's a big factor, it's not what made me angrily mutter to myself and trudge over to blogger to complain. My two major gripes are these: 1. Long strings of paragraphs full of inane th...

Having written is a lot nicer than trying to write something in the first place. It's terribly satisfying to have a polished, finished product, which you can then curl up with in the quiet of your home and hug and fondle. But man, getting to that stage can be pulling teeth sometimes. (PS, I have a new appreciation for that term, as I think anyone who's not a boarded dentist pretty much hates trying to do complicated dental work. Ugh teeth. ) In the course of working through large-scale rewrites, I've been experiencing a sensation that I can best liken to a rubix cube. Chapter by chapter, I undo everything and turn it into a big mess. I stare at the screen and complain and pull at my hair. Figuring out how to fit the pieces together seems like an impossible headache, and sometimes I just have to fiddle around making moves here and there. But by the end of editing a chapter, it all clicks into place, and suddenly the final product is that much closer--like when you twist ...

It turns out space travel wrecks the human body. So much for our fanciful dreams of gallivanting through the galaxy, right? This realization was a lot like when our anatomy professor pointed out that things like dragons and gryphons are impossible because of the wing-to-body ratio required to fly as weight increases. He was all, "There's a reason there are no flying birds bigger than a dog" (and the awesome giant fliers have gone extinct). But back to space travel. I went to a veterinary conference for exotic animal vets (to learn about bird stuff), and the keynote speaker there was a vet for NASA. Yeah, that blew my little mind. Sci-fi and vet stuff generally hang out in different corners of my life, but for a whole hour, this guy talked about training for space missions, showed pictures of himself in space, and discussed the physiological effects of space travel on animals and people. And because he was talking to hundreds of geeky veterinarians, a lot of the questi...

I'd like to share some of my absolute favorite books with you. I have a lot of non-SFF favorites ( East of Eden and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for example), but I'll only be talking about SF today. I had the idea to share recent reads with you guys and make recommendations, but I realized my definition of a "recent read" is a bit variable, and I wanted to lay some groundwork first. So I'm going to cover a lot of ground with one post here, by pointing out the big milestones in my sci-fi reading experiences. In the future, I'll talk more about books as I come across them. This is not at all a comprehensive list. Rather, it's a collection of important books that influenced me, which I can talk about intelligently since I've read them. There are plenty more great sci-fi books still on my to-read list. Vet school interfered quite a bit with my reading, so I'm still playing catch-up trying to read the great literary classics as well as SF cla...

There's an old adage that "writing is rewriting," which alludes to the fact that the first time you put story to page is only a fraction of the process. For the non-writers among you, I'm sure you're aware that novels go through many, many drafts before taking their final form. What they don't tell you is that you get it as perfect as you possibly can, only to discover there's a ton of things that actually need to be fixed up and redone--over and over again. Novels are a lot like butterflies. That first draft is a little wee caterpillar, maybe a really ugly one, or maybe one that catches your eye. You set it aside so it can develop in its cocoon. Then you come back to turn it into a butterfly, with your fresh, critical eye that allows you to viciously hack that cocoon apart (my analogy may not be working as well as I hoped). That cocoon-to-butterfly process is the polishing stage: first what you can do by yourself, then with the help of alpha and beta...

Scientific writing and creative writing complement each other in some ways, and totally contradict each other in others. When I'm reading or writing, I completely switch my brain over depending on what I'm doing, and don't even think about it. In vet school, I did a lot of technical writing. Sure, I was working on my first novel when I had the chance, but most of my time was spent working on assignments, case studies, and medical records. As an actual vet, I still read a lot of journal articles and textbooks. And there's some definite differences in scientific writing. Things Not So Good For Creative Writing 1. Passive Voice This one always really sticks out to me. Research is meant to be objective, and so it's generally described as such. It's standard and expected to use passive sentences so you can avoid saying "we" or "I": "The culture was incubated at room temperature" or "A neurological exam was performed." I...