fallow, adjective. 2: dormant, inactive —used especially in the phrase to lie fallow A New First Post The final posts in my previous blog were written in 2016, roughly five years ago. What was happening between then and now? Why did I let those websites lie fallow all that time? I could make a number …
[Originally posted on my former blog, Michael Runs the Gamut] I had tweeted about it on Twitter, and posted about it on the Jagged Man website. [2021 Note: The Jagged Man website is currently dead. It will likely be resuscitated when a second edition of the book goes on sale. Sometime in 2023?] Although I …
[Originally posted on my former blog, Michael Runs the Gamut] For the past several years I’ve submitted queries (although not nearly often enough), and pitched my novels at conferences, with no success. Okay, I lied at least a couple of times in that first sentence. In 2002, I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time, …
[Originally posted on my former blog, Michael Runs the Gamut] A couple of weeks ago, a question was asked at the [now defunct] Fiction Writers and Editors Group at LinkedIn. It was simply, “What are you working on?” After I had responded, along with a hundred or so other writers, it occurred to me that …
[Originally posted on my former blog, Michael Runs the Gamut] In my last post, I talked about the writer’s retreat I went to in Alpine, Texas. A couple of months ago, I was invited to another retreat, much closer this time, in Galveston. A couple of friends of mine, Dominick D’Aunno and Matt Adams, decided …
[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 …
After Minay and I got married in August 1982 — yes, it’s been nearly thirty-two years, and she hasn’t killed me yet — I made sure I had an area to write in. Sometimes it was makeshift, like the corner in the second bedroom of our first apartment (which also served as our exercise room …
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 …
[Originally posted on my former blog, Michael Runs the Gamut] I’ve been writing all my life — plays, poetry, short stories, work-related writing, even a few stabs at novels — often with the thought of being published or produced, but I didn’t fully commit to it until five or six years ago. My excuse was …
[Originally posted on my former blog, Michael Runs the Gamut] As a former actor, I understand the trials of marketing oneself (and accept them, begrudgingly). Many of the things we do in life are contests of a sort. Job interviews are a competition against others to see who will win the prize of being hired. …