Author Archives: Elizabeth

I was doing a great job posting regularly before my January hacking incident. When I cut back on blogging, one of the things that I dropped was my monthly lists of things I’d posted on the blog of All Rights Reserved, my mostly local writing group.

So, here is an approximately quarterly roundup. This is not everything, just the things I still think are worth pointing out.

• Why “If you can quit, then quit” pisses me off – in which I disagree with some writing “advice”
• Fun with slush – in which I read slush
• Talent – in which I believe in talent
• Revising and writing advice – in which I examine some writing advice
• Revisiting my writing schedule – in which I…revisit my writing schedule
• Another reason to write every day – In which I’m a better writer than a programmer (though I did spend a few recent lunch hours writing a program to clean up my meeting notes for me)
• Do Less? No, thanks. – in which I disagree with myself
• Audiobooks – In which I try audiobooks

This weekend I was lucky to be able to attend a writing retreat. I love hanging out with other writers, and I’m more productive when I don’t have my house/yard/etc. around to distract me. I finished revising another chunk of my novel, revised a short story, and mostly went over all the ideas I’ve developed for the book I’m writing next and created an outline.

The writing process I’ve developed means that even though I haven’t started writing the book yet, I have 27,000 words on it. Not all of them will make it into even the first draft, much less later drafts. But it’s nice not to start from zero.

This month I’ll be finishing the rest of the novel revisions, developing a more detailed outline of the new book, and starting to put words into the actual draft.

Speaking of productivity, I’ve increased the amount of writing time I put in each week by around 50% since spring. I have the same amount of time blocked out on my schedule, but having more of it on weekends than weekday evenings means I am more likely to put the time in. This also explains the state of my yard and the half-finished pair of shorts on the sewing table.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been revising a novel to submit to Strange Chemistry while they’re taking unagented submissions. I like having a deadline to aim for.

I usually dislike revising, but this has been going well–of course, it’s also the third time I’ve gone over this book, so most of the big problems were already taken care of. It’s still taking a big chunk of my writing time, but not all of it: I’m also working on the outline of the book I want to write this winter.

Combining those two projects is taking a lot of time. Last week I didn’t quite get everything done that I wanted to, even though I hit all of my scheduled writing slots. So this week I’ll be trying to squeeze in more writing time.

Which is a very long way of saying that I haven’t gone through more photos of my July trip yet.

In other news, I sold another story to Daily Science Fiction, so look for that in a few months. I like working on books but the short production time for short stories, especially flash, is really nice.