Rhino Puzzlings

 "All writing is rewriting."   Now that we're in the depths of November (half gone already!) I'm thinking about NaNoWriMo and the relative freedom it granted for a month: all drafting, no apologies, no edits. Pure forward momentum. NaNo's promise lead to December's Despair, though, once the ink dried and my hands uncramped and I sat down with the draft after a few weeks and said...   "Boy, this thing is hot trash." And then put it in the bin (a literal storage bin, not the garbage) and ignored it. I have a decade-plus of lightly-edited first drafts in the corner, and to date only two of them have achieved escape velocity:  One Last Quest  which tumbled like my personal Icarus back to ground, and  Trouble  which remains airborne . All other stories are still locked away, compressed under the weight of their own specific issues and my inertia about dusting them off. As I remember well from NaNo days, the temptation was great, right about mid-month, to ...

I'm preparing to be a guest lecturer this week in a multi-week seminar, relaying information I've gathered (and mistakes I've made) along my re-animated self-publishing journey. In the spirit of lifting up the community, and in sharing it out to the students, I've reorganized things on the site a bit and dropped the self-publishing pages and these new downloads in a general "Resources" section. I'll be filling this out more in weeks and months to come to make the site useful. I'm also trying to define just what my role is in this great creative adventure. I've dialed in "curmudgeon" now, and "AI skeptic and naysayer" and "general grumpy rhino" but now's an opportunity to balance those out with "slightly opinionated in a helpful manner" and "experienced with the scars to prove it." As I state in my coursework, self-publishing is not difficult, but it is complex. Lots of moving parts, lots of t...