Newsletter 039 – May 26, 2023 Hi, Quick Update: The first draft of Flood and Fire is now about 26,000 words, but far from complete. I’m working on it a couple of hours a day, in between video training on some of the software I’ll talk about below. I usually lose a quarter of the …
Newsletter 035 – March 24, 2023 Hi, In the previous newsletter I mentioned that I do try to write and edit for several hours each day, but sometimes life’s little interruptions keep that from happening. I’m often awake before sunrise, and a recent day was no exception. That day I woke up around 5:00 am …
Newsletter 009 – February 25th, 2022 Hi, About the image above: Late in the afternoon on May 15th, 2010, Minay and I arrived in the town of Little Sutton, about five miles across the River Mersey from the Beatles’ original stomping grounds. I desperately wanted to go over and wander along Penny Lane and see …
[Originally posted on my former blog, Michael Runs the Gamut] At last summer’s WLT Agents & Editors Conference, in Austin, Texas (June 21-23, 2013), I was finally ready to seriously pitch my thriller, The Jagged Man. I thought the book was ready, too. I had been working on it for several years, but I felt …
I’ve been to two writing retreats in the last six months, and they were both wonderful (and an extremely rare experience for me). I don’t know what your writing situation is like, but let me tell you a little bit about mine. I retired in 2009, after nearly forty years in the workforce (thirty of …
A few days ago, my wife, Minay, and I took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Cave Paintings of Lascaux exhibit that’s running at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. It will be here in Houston through March 23, 2014. It has already been displayed in Bordeaux, France, and at the Field Museum in Chicago. It …
[Originally posted on my previous website, michael dot sirois dot com] Robert Heinlein’s rules appeared in an essay “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction (1947).” The publishing industry has changed a great deal, but the thought behind most of these are still perfectly valid. Heinlein’s Rules for Writing You must write. You must finish what …
[Originally posted on my previous website, michael dot sirois dot com] I ran across a Canadian website the other day which offered a scenario for what would happen during the process of writing a novel, “from inspiration to final royalty cheque.” You can read the rest of the original document (a PDF, 69 kb) here, …