Rhino Puzzlings

Ideas are cheap. Free, even.  I have a great idea for a story  is not something any writer needs to hear, because truthfully, we're up to our earholes in them. I don't mean to sound self-important or smug about it. I'm not saying that we're blessed with one-hundred percent sure-fire successful ideas, just  ideas  in general. We don't need more, because we're drowning in our own. Worse yet, the only way to tell the winners from the stinkers appears to be  putting in the work  and  developing the story  and generally investing our selves and souls and sanity on the hope that with enough polish, patience, and prayer, we can turn the brilliant gem of a thought into something worth keeping. That's the dream. The reality of ideas, and developing them, is that we are human and imperfect and messy and clumsy and distracted and hungry and busy and a million other things, and we're not always able to bring our best selves to the writing desk every time. We'...

Preparing  Trouble  for pre-release now, with a target launch of June 1, 2026. As I've moved from edit phase to layout, I am seeing the promise of all that work last fall to automate the process. I tried to use my nerd powers for good and set up automation for the processing. Do writers keep a GitHub? I do. The Scrivener-to-pandoc-to-LaTeX pipeline is not super lightweight, but I'm giving the book another typos pass now, and they're popping up in clumps. Being able to re-run the whole layout end-to-end is a good thing. Needing to do it because I find piddling mistakes is less good. Such is the sexy, high-profile life of an indie, right? I'm excited to get this one out the door. It's the longest-timeline project I've worked on yet, taking perhaps ten years total to come together, with long gaps in the trunk in-between. My drive right now is the dopamine hit of ordering a proof copy, which can't be done until all the dimensions are settled, which can't be ...

Preparing a lecture for class, themed around the notion of "writing as play" and specifically of "creativity as a child's voice." Writers carry a number of different voices in our heads, willingly or unwillingly. I've opined on the three-part model before (Creator, Reviser, Editor) and I'm seeing their shapes in my life now. Not actually  literally  seeing imaginary people, but in the way that I'm tackling problems.  The Creator makes the ideas, the Reviser lays them straight, the Editor/Critic passes judgement. If they all stick to their lanes, the process just works. I feel good about my ability to cordon them off while I'm writing, to put our the big yellow sign "Children Playing" with the small hand-written rider, "No Editors Allowed." Nothing shuts a child's improvised game down faster than an adult showing up attempting to apply Order and Rules to the structure, and then  *pfft*  the fun goes, too. Letting go of the ...

 Getting close now.  Trouble  is back from betas, I've incorporated comments, looked for all the horrible lazy crutch words and phrases ("about," "nearly," "I'd thought") and I'm giving it a listen now. Text-to-speech is my co-pilot, and I find the flat, robotic voice helps me find stuff more easily than a smooth,  high-tech one does. It's barely contextually-aware, and determined to foul up some words ("polish" is always pronounced like someone-from-Poland, regardless of capitalization.) I believe the roughness helps me stay focused. It's jarring. Passages that I've gone through before are getting the barest touches, and ones where I've expanded are small divots, not massive chasms of editing. I'm feeling... done. Just about done. Not "finished," never "finished," but done. Art is never complete, just abandoned, after all. It feels good to watch my progress through the draft. I'm excited to...

 It's close. I can feel it. That's the sensation I've got right now, thinking about the next book. While it was out for beta-reading,  Trouble  got to sit on the shelf for a while while other pieces got my attention. There's a pace to my story development, and I'm only beginning to recognize that part of that pace is taking time away. Letting the story stand (and be someone else's concern) gave me both the luxury of fresh eyes when it came back, and motivation to send it out for reading. What I'm now trying to manage is balancing the urge to finish the piece with the extra time it's going to take to be done. At first, I'd vaguely targeted a March release, and obviously that didn't happen. April feels unlikely, now that we're past the midpoint. Maybe something summerish? I don't have a fixed date in mind, and I do find deadlines weirdly motivating to work towards. I thank my rhino's Midwestern Work Ethic, stamped into its DNA. Knowing ...