Writing is Cake

I recently had the awesome experience of giving a presentation entitled “Surviving The Next Zombie Uprising” at Ignite Phoenix II. The format revolves around a 20 page presentation, with the slides automatically clicking over every 15 seconds. The five minutes feels like it goes by in a blur as you hit the main [...]

The shotgun was heavy in the boy’s hand. It was an old .410–a single-shot Winchester with a top lever action and an exterior hammer. His grandpa had been shooting it since childhood, and in the chamber was an old-fashioned paper cartridge filled with birdshot. The boy had three more shells tucked into his shirt pocket, [...]

In David Foster Wallace’s article entitled “Tense Present:  Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage,” the late novelist, essayist, and part-time college instructor asks:  “Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale?”  Foster was himself a [...]

Crap!  It’s almost November.  That means National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for us hipster doofuses.  I am not done with my current project (also a novel) but I’m going in anyway.  Screw it!  This event is about getting the damn words on paper.  Well, on the computer screen but whatever.  I’m not waiting until next year [...]

I found this black widow spider while cleaning my grill about a month ago. I reached underneath to turn on the propane (about six inches to the right of this picture) and felt some spider webs. Annoyed about having to clean it out before using the grill, I opened the door and saw the little [...]

I’ve started using a visual way to develop my screenplay, which is working out rather well. I’ve been working on a rather intriticate story that covers multiple timelines (past and present) that converge midway through the story.  It was driving me bonkers trying to remember what happened ” before” something else in the narrative.
I went [...]

The teenager who works behind the counter at the corner convenience store after school; the hot girl in spandex who works out at the gym in the mornings; the elderly widow that lives across the street and two houses down. What do they have in common? Well, in a zombie story, they may [...]

I happened upon PROMPTuesday today. Since it is kind of similar to the bi-weekly word exercises we do, I decided to give it a go.
Word: Egg.
Genre: Romantic Comedy.
Limits: 10 minutes and under 250 words.
Title: the morning after
“I’m not sure I have ever tasted a pancake quite like this,” he mused, choosing his words carefully [...]

Often for me it isn’t the time it takes to write that’s the problem, it’s how I can somehow waste that time once I sit down.  I think there may be some concentration vampire that lives under my desk, but I have yet to find him so must ponder an alternate root cause.
M. Jaynes blogged [...]

“[Bill] entered the room, which could only be described as nondescript.”
I’m going to leave off the citation of where I stumbled across that particular sentence to protect the guilty.  The next few lines, not surprisingly, proceeded to describe the room.  It was an office waiting room, with tan carpeting, brown chairs, neatly stacked magazines, and [...]