MojoWriter.com

Let’s see if this works:

Lord help me, I would never, ever want to get slapdashed upon the foul.

- From William Gibson’s Blog

My friend Bill and I started up an online SF publication several years ago, called Dark Energy, mainly because we wanted to learn the editing side of the business.

Speaking for myself, the education has been extremely valuable.  I’ve been able to apply it directly to my professional life, as editing is pretty much what I do for a living now — albeit in a corporate environment.

But as we all learn, we grow, and sadly I came to the conclusion that I’ve moved past our dear old SF publication.  I don’t have the time to devote to it, and neither does Bill.  Our attempt to use a junior editor didn’t really help.  And so this morning I pulled the plug on the website.

I’d thought briefly about selling it, or passing it on to others to continue running, but finally decided I am very proud to have built what we built and would hate to see someone else wrecking it.  For a small publication with a non-existent budget, we upheld extremely high standards and chose only the best of the best that landed in our slush pile.  There was no publishing friends because they were our friends, and there was no publishing of our own works.  Though at least a few of those who we did publish became our friends, and one even joined our writer’s group.  (Denny, we miss you.)

One of the stories we published, Jesus Christ Lord of Hosts Meets L.A. County by Holly Day, remains one of my favorite all time stories anywhere.

I went ahead and paid for the domain name for another year, and so the stories we published will remain there for everyone to read until June 2009.

I’m focusing my energies back toward writing, and also toward podcasting which — thanks to Melanie Fletcher — is my current creative obsession:  Don’t Quit Your Day Job: The Podcast

Bill still edits another publication we started, Quantum Kiss, which specializes in Romantic Speculative Fiction.

Back in March of last year, I had signed on to my dream job, or at least what I thought was my dream job:  Full Time Writer

But now I have my uber-dream job:  Digital Marketing Specialist.

Now it’s back to most of my writing being for my own projects.  What I’m doing professionally, now, is being a sort of hands-on project manager for several large important corporate websites.

I love creating websites, as you can no doubt tell from my large collection of them.

And now I won’t be burning up all my writing fuel cells at work, which means more writing on these blogs again, and more time spent on my novel.

Merry Christmas to all my writer friends!

Merry Christmas to William Ledbetter, who is on the brink of great things. His stories are making it on the award ballots and he’s rubbing shoulders with some of the big names in SF. One of these days soon he will be one of those big names. All that aside, he is one of my closest friends, confidant, and fellow brain stormer.

Merry Christmas to Tim Nunes, another of my closest friends, a writer working for a big computer company in Chicago who, in his spare time, writes and publishes accomplished prose. His flights of fancy are truly literary in depth, though he has the disturbing habit of killing off his protagonists. (I guess they deserve it.) Tim and I go way back to Stockton, California, where we worked at the same ComputerLand computer store … where I would use company paper and ink to print out entire novel manuscripts on dot matrix printers.

Merry Christmas to Melanie Fletcher, who (like Bill) has her stories on award ballots, and is soon to launch into big-name-authorness. While living here in the Dallas area, she is from Chicago … I’m seeking some sort of synchronistic pattern here … here’s wishing her and her husband total awesomeness in 2008.

Merry Christmas to Lycan, a terrific blog writer and good friend of my daughter Danielle. Thank you for keeping tabs on me here! May you and yours have a wonderful new year.

Merry Christmas to Delilah Rehm, who will one day be known as Queen of the Zombies (not that she is a zombie, but she is a master of writing zombie stories). 2008 is going to be wild and wicked cool, just you wait.

Merry Christmas to Heather Anastasiu, who this year finished up the first draft of a novel retelling the tale of Persephone and Hades. Here’s wishing her and her family a breakthrough 2008!

Merry Christmas to Gloria Oliver, who writes terrific historical fantasies especially when it has something to do with Samurai. She gives a mean critique. Literally. Here’s wishing her a breakthrough new year as well!

Merry Christmas to Jeff Turner, who I don’t ever see anymore, but is sure to make a name for himself in Hollywood. May he and his family live long and prosper, and may 2008 bring him much joy and satisfaction.

Same with Derek James, who left SF to go off and become a real scientist. Merry Christmas and happy quantum nanobots to you!

Merry Christmas to Jessica Fritsche, who I’ve know for years as “Diva Jess” — I’d discovered her via her poetry some years ago. May her and her new husband have a wonderful, joyous, and bountiful new year! And I hope she’s feeling better.

Merry Christmas to Saadia Ali Aschemann, talented poet, mother, and trophy wife. Her book Lavish Lines / Luscious Lies should arrive in my mailbox today. May 2008 bring you even more success and happiness!

Merry Christmas, as well, to the newest writer in my circle of friends, Chrissy Davis, my nephew’s wife, who this year has made her first long-overdue steps into the world of poetic publishing. I know you don’t celebrate holidays but Merry Christmas and Happy New Year anyway!

To all my friends at Future Classics and Black Hole Surfers, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

And to YOU, you who are reading this, have a wonderful holiday season and may you grow and prosper and find your happy place.

For those of you out there who are sick and tired of your Word 2007 crashing 11 times a day, Microsoft has released a Office 2007 SP1 service pack that is supposed to fix it (and a myriad other bugs).

Honestly, if it weren’t for the amazing ability they built into Word 2007 to save your work 99.9% of the time right before it crashes, I would have abandoned it for trusty old Word 2003 months ago, despite all the fantastic features.

Let’s hope this SP1 patch really does fix these crashes.

Get the update from the Office Update website

“Employee break room” has always sounded sinister to me. Someone who didn’t know better might think this is the room where employees are broken.

My younger daughter’s computer died earlier this week.  I finally tracked the problem down to the drive controller, which is on the motherboard.

There’s no way I’m buying a new motherboard.  Not for that computer.  So I went on eBay and bought a IBM NetVista with Pentium 4 - 1.6ghz yadda yadda yadda for a whole $20.  That’s cheaper than a hard drive, even with shipping.  And it’s nearly twice the computer as her old one.

Twenty bucks.  Wow.  Computers really are a commodity.

Tonight I just found out my old buddy Dan Leadbetter was on an episode of Attack Of The Show. Let’s see if the embedded link works:

Something did happen. That is, on my novel. I had been stuck for weeks on one scene.

I’d come to one of those dreadful spots where I really didn’t know what would happen next. I know all sorts of things that will happen later, but I’d written myself into a scene where I knew something important had to happen with the female lead character, but I didn’t know what.

So.

Last night I sat for a good hour going over in my head all the things that have happened to her, and what she’d been through before the story even started, and then mentally put myself into those situations and felt what she would have felt … all of that leading up to the scene I was stuck on. And then the answer came to me … the obvious answer that I couldn’t see, the perfect twist which fed right back into the rest of the story and turned up the conflict knob another notch.

The dam broke. The words flowed. I’m writing again.