This starts out being general and perhaps a little polemic, but it becomes personal and rather happy, so please stick with me.

Writing, Privacy -- and A Room of My Own

Part One

In her famous essay Virginia Woolf (famously) said that in order to produce fiction the female writer should have a little money -- that is, an independent income -- and a room of her own.

She then went on to explain at length why this is so, offering many examples...

My current WIP is too long and wordy so I need to focus on chopping back - but how do you do that when you thought you had something relatively good in the first place?

After my first editing run with Teresa I managed to slash the first 28k words down to 14k, so have been applying those principles to the rest of the WIP.

When approaching new chapter:

1. READ first. No editing. Get an idea of what information is being presented

2. DELETION: is the...

Recently I discovered that I had a problem with Facebook. It was not really a serious one, more something on a personal level, but certain posts were starting to annoy me. Generally it was people sharing quotes and comments that were meant to seem funny and derogatory at others expense, coming across as smug and intelligent, when there were flaws all the way through them.

Of course if I responded it would have led to all sorts of arguments, so I hid away for a few weeks, blocked the...

Not the saint himself, naturally. John and I visited the mission named after him yesterday.

There are few buildings in California where you feel like you can reach out and touch the distant past, but Misión San Francisco de Asís is one of them. (It is also called Mission Dolores, because there was a stream nearby which had already been named by a scouting party Arroyo de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, the Brook of Our Lady of Sorrows.) A building that is over 200 years old will...

Candidate for online SF's all-time low- Publishing scammer scuzzballs The Write Agenda decide to support misogynist, racist turd Theodore Beale (aka 'Vox Day') in support of his bid for the SFWA presidency. If Scientology pops it's head around the door we'll have the total package!