Novel Progress and Other Irons

The Novel
I’ve been working my way through the first draft of what I’m calling my first novel. I have written a couple other long – um – things that, while technically novels, well, let’s just leave them in the drawer filed under “experience.”

Izzy Crow is the working title and the name of the protagonist. Here’s the proto logline: 

Freed from a powerful spell after centuries, a fairy tale princess must learn to live in the modern world.

I have a lot of irons in the fire, so I’ve set what I hope is a reasonable goal of completing a chapter a week. I’ve added a word count progress bar to the sidebar in order to keep myself accountable to y’all. 

Other Irons

I’m about halfway through the University of Iowa’s How Writer’sWrite Fiction mooc and really enjoying the experience. The syllabus is well thought out and the lectures have been useful and thought provoking. While I have not spent a lot of time on the teaching team discussion boards there are plenty of opportunities to interact with both teachers and students

The writing assignments are thoughtful and challenging enough to have me stretching my writerly muscles. It’s genre friendly but literary over genre, which for me who writes in both, is a refreshing change, and just the thing I needed to shake up my writing.

The feedback/critique element is a bit hit or miss, but I expected this. (All of the feedback on the writing assignments is student on student. The teaching team is in place to support the lecture discussion threads.) This is a "massive" and "open" course, so there are all kinds of people participating for all kinds of reasons and at all levels of ability.

I think what I am enjoying the most is connecting with writers from all over the world. I hope to not only generate some material that will be converted into complete short stories over the next few weeks, but also to form some budding friendships with other writers who I would have otherwise never met.

The Ecotones Anthology

My story, The Silva, will be appearing in Ecotones, SFFWorld's  fourth annual anthology.

The table of contents has been announced, and boy howdy am I in some amazing company: Ken Liu, Tobias Buckell, and Lauren Beukes!

The kickstarter for this anthology will be debuting next week, so you’ll be hearing more about it and all the great stories within soon!

I'm Back and I Promise to Stop Neglecting You!

Photo by Matthias Haker

Hello poor neglected blog. While I’ve been away planning and now writing this novel, I’ve missed you.

No, really!

So, I’ve decided to try to come by a little more often, albeit for short visits. No long think pieces for now.

As if I’m not busy enough, I’ve also decided to participate in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program’s MOOC “How WritersWrite Fiction.” I’m posting today because it’s not too late for you to sign up.

MOOC stands Massive Open Online Course. It doesn’t cost anything and there is no obligation to complete assignments. But, I believe there will great rewards for participating in the course. “How Writers Write Fiction is currently in its welcome week. The first official class will be Thursday, October 1, so there is still time to join. Writers, both aspiring and experienced, from all over the world are participating. I audited their poetry course earlier this year and while the video lectures were awesome and the writing assignments looked well thought out, one of the biggest benefits is a chance to meet and interact with writers from all over the world.

I’m looking forward the experience. I think it will be useful for my writing in general, and hopefully, for my current novel in particular.* 

If you decide to join in you can do it here. Once you've signed on, be sure to find me on the message boards and say hi!

* More about the novel-in-progress next post, which will be soon. I promise!