On January 26th of this year, While making a run at the final edit of the final book in my Veiled Earth Trilogy, I spotted a terrible digression and some plot flaws and had to excise a few words- thirty thousand, basically. That took the manuscript from complete at 88k to not even close at 58k. Today I hit 88k, having revised and shored up and extended and inserted and… god damn it. I fell in love with what should have been a one-sided, plot moving, opposite-of-the-hero type

To dialect or not to dialect? Mark Twain may be one of the only authors I know that did it with strict accuracy and got away with a whole book -two actually- written in dialect. Jim: “We’s safe, Huck, we’s safe! Jump up and crack yo’ heels. Dat’s de good ole Cairo at las’, I jis knows it.” Huck: “I’ll take the canoe and go see, Jim. It mightn’t be, you know.” Harper Lee did it in Mockingbird, too. “Reckon I have. Almost died first year I come to school and et them pecans — f

Outrunning the dragon. The reason I keep writing in relative obscurity is because I can’t possibly stop. It’s anathema to my very being, my own self-image, that I NOT write. I knew the odds when I started, just as every young writer knows, and I believed I was different, just as every young writer does. In between panicking and thinking your work is shit, you are shit, and you have all the skill of a punch-drunk money hammering on a typewriter with the corpse of a dead chicke