Freddie's Braindroppings

Today is November 14th, which means we are officially only one month away from A Honeyed Light's  release date. I think now's a good time to start freaking out. I'm calm. I swear I'm calm.* *This is a lie. Anyway, I figure now is a good time to start the real promo push! I'd love to get more people to add the book on Goodreads , so here's what we're gonna do. Read on!

In an effort to blog more frequently and reliably, I'm instituting some themed days on here. Today kicks of Writing Wednesday. I'm hoping to do this every other Wednesday. The theme of Writing Wednesday will be resources, tips, and other things that assist me or that I've seen assist other writers. I'm starting off real easy with this epic masterpost of writing tools that I saved over on my Tumblr.  I haven't managed to explore every link yet, so there's a good chance future WW posts will be one or more things on this list, expanded and opined on. For now, I'll just list some of the ones I'm most interested in exploring. Name Generators - name generators are my JAM. I use them most in my non-contemporary stories, or for secondary, tertiary or less important characters in contemporary ones. MCs always get a bit more thought put into them. That's a post for another day. Ways to avoid saying the word 'very' - I'm most intereste...

The last almost two weeks have been intense where my writing is concerned. I think I churned out about 28,000 words in that time, which is a ton for me, considering I work full time and sometimes struggle to squeak out 400 words a day. So I decided to make my goal 440 words per day. Then I noticed I was consistently putting out 1,000 words, so I decided to up the goal to 1,000 to meet what I was already producing. As soon as I did that, I started putting out between 1,500 and 2,000. This past Friday I wrote 6,000 words. I haven't had this kind of productivity since I did NaNoWriMo six years ago and churned out 7,000 words on day one. And that was because I wasn't working at that time. So I'm really proud of the success I've had with this novella. And even better, I finished it today. I need to reread and edit like crazy, as well as give it to a couple other people to read, but I finished it exactly when I wanted to. Not only that, but I already have a ton of...

This year has started off a little rough for pop culture lovers. Losing David Bowie and Alan Rickman in the same week, at the same age, to the same disease has made me want to write off 2016 before its first month is even over. (Pausing a  moment here to say fuck cancer .) But both of these men meant something to a lot of people. David Bowie made many people feel like they were not the only freaks in the world. He made being weird seem utterly cool and perfectly acceptable. That's so very important. Alan Rickman portrayed a number of character, spanning so many different genres it's hard to think that people haven't seen him in something. From Hans Gruber in Die Hard to Severus Snape in Harry Potter. My personal favorites were his roles in Dogma and Galaxy Quest. He was a brilliant actor, and form all the accounts of his co-stars, a great man. So yeah. It's been a rough week. But there have been some positives as well. I got my first round of edits back ...

I have awesome news! I submitted one of the stories I'd been working on to Less Than Three's Packing Heat anthology and it was accepted! I got the news on Saturday but because the holidays are coming up fast and furious, I didn't have a chance to update it until now. I have my signed and counter-signed contract, it's in the editing queue and now is the waiting game, part the second. The anthology probably won't be out until at least mid next-year, but I'm certainly not resting on my laurels. I have two more anthologies and at least one collection call I'd like to write for, that I have ideas for. Some a bit more solid than others. Not to mention some general submissions as well. Hoping to get a lot of writing done during my holiday vacation. We'll see. Wish me luck. And while I don't know who else is gonna be in this antho with me, if you're out there reading this and you got accepted to Packing Heat, congrats! I can't wait to be in ...

Heya folks! Look: I didn't let another whole month go by before posting again! Success!  I hit some awesome milestones already this month so I wanted to check in. First off, the story I was diving back into in my last post? Finished! Sent it to some beta readers for initial edits. I'm hoping to have it fully edited and ready for submission by year's end. Though I know acquiring editors get a lot of submissions in December due to NaNo, so maybe I'll wait until January? I'll think it over. But rather than rest on my laurels I moved onto the next project while I wait for edits to come back. I had a lot of setbacks with this one. It started rough and dry, and I scrapped it and started again, but that was also sort of leading me in circles. Finally I sat down and rewrote my 'outline' (it's really just a massive plot dump, but it's step by step what I want to happen) and everything started falling into place. I have better motivations for the char...

Welcome to fall, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere like me. I woke up and it was suddenly October and I realized I needed to get my rear in gear where my next submission to Less Than Three was concerned. I have a story previously published in an e-zine that I'd like to rework for this next submission. It's only 1500 words shy of the minimum word count and I sat down this morning to figure out how I was going to work this out. After a quick outline I figured out what I needed to add and change. Next step is getting the story removed from where it's currently up for free. But all that to say there was writing done today and more to come! I'm pretty excited abut this and hoping I can cram enough writing/editing time into the month to get this submission in. It's for the Packing Heat call. So, that's where I am right now. My October's pretty packed itself so I just have to make sure to make as much time to write as possible. What are your...

Wow folks, I am so sorry I disappeared. Between the holidays, a new job, a vacation, and then just life in general, i just was not making enough time to come and post here, I'll give a quick update on some things and try to get back in the swing of posting more regularly. Just before Christmas I found out I was getting a promotion and a raise. While that made my Christmas very merry, it did also pretty much double my workload. I have no time to sneak in writing during lunch and when I get home at night I'm too brain-dead to try. Meanwhile I still have a ton of ideas I need to get written so I need to find the time to make sure I write. My vacation was awesome and just what I needed. Unfortunately it meant I was playing catch up with the new workload. I still feel like I am catching up. There are mistakes I keep making but I also have been told I'm doing some great things so I'm somewhat relieved. I'm excited and drained by my job every day but I'm happy, so ...

There are now samples of my writing up on my website! Okay only three, but there are more to come. Also, I figured out a new (hopefully better?) commenting system on my website as well, so if you want to comment on said samples, you may. I am a little more than a week away from the Lovely, Dark, and Deep deadline and while I think I can finish by the 31st, I'm worried I may not be able to get someone who has time to give it a once-over with notes for correction before then. I asked for an extension on my last submission so I don't want to do it again, but at the same time... Well, let's worry about that if I don't finish by tomorrow... Tootles!

So things are going to be a little different around here. I got a new blog, courtesy of Blogger. I'll be doing all my updates from here from now on. But what about my old blog, you ask? Well I will be clearing out the entries there and using that space for writing samples for you! So why do it this way? Well, the native blog that comes with the service that I use to publish my page, which is what I had been using, doesn't allow for RSS feeds to be made of it. This makes it nearly impossible to embed my blog elsewhere or have people be able to follow it easily. As I was realizing this, I was also trying to figure out how to add a 'second blog' to the site in order to post up some writing samples. I liked the way the native blog looked and wanted the sample to look that way, but it's not possible to add a second native blog. Solution! Get a separate blog that allows for RSS feeds, and use the native one for samples! Ta-dah! I also have more news: as menti...