Yup, you heard it here first, folks.  The tank is dry, the muse is shot.  This week I don’t feel like I’ve got anything worthwhile to say. Huh?  Is that really Mike talking?  The man who can wax poetic about a loaf of stale bread? Once again… yup. Sean and I met a second time in less than a week to “Work” on our first chapter contest entries.  I managed to distract him for more than 90 minutes by talking about writing without actually ever typing a single word.  Pretty clever, wouldn’t you say? The truth of the matter is, I managed to get my book submitted again (yes, it was rejected once more; for those of you keeping track, […]

Have you ever read a story where the character seems too good to be true?  I actually can’t recall too many off the top of my head.  I suspect it’s because within a chapter or so of reading the character I’ve dismissed the story as crap and moved on.  Honestly, I can only think of one character who was without faults (as we mortals know them anyway) and the book he appears in is FULL of flawed characters. Anyway, preaching aside, my point is, for a character in a story to actually be interesting (in my opinion, at least) the character or characters must have some flaws.  “But why?” you might ask.  “Why MUST a character have flaws to be interesting?”  […]

So, last week I set myself a SMART challenge that was both smaller than some I’ve done before and, at the same time, bigger.  What the…?  Does he have any idea how stupid that sounds? Of course I do.  Self-awareness is one of those things that defines sentience which, I’d like to believe I am… sentient, that is… sort of.  But bare with me a moment while I “try” to explain my opening statement. The goals I set were smaller than usual in that I was only setting specific, SMART, goals for a 7-day period of time.  The writing tasks were finite in nature to suit the timeframe.  With me so far?  Good, cause I’d really hate to lose you at […]

How does one exactly balance the rigors of daily life and writing?  I think that question has as many answers as there are writers out there.  I know, we’ve heard from Sean that he needed to step away for a while when change in job was an issue.  I’ve seen evidence that when the stress and uncertainty of job-change is in the air, it affects others the same way.  Not having changed jobs in a while, I’m not exactly sure what it would do to me and my writing. But there are other things to consider too:  family, friends, hobbies, daily chores.  They all need time.  For me personally, I’ve got commitments with church, I’m taking an evening class, my […]