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My little NaNoWriMo

05/02/2024

Write a novel in a month—are you kidding me?  NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is held every November and involves a grinding daily word count towards a complete 50,000-word manuscript.  I’ve admired the people who pull it off. But either November…

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Star Trek, Into Darkness: Movie Review.

04/16/2024

2013, 13+ on Amazon Prime, on IMDb  The second instalment of the new ‘alternate reality’ version of Star Trek, a fantastic tour through future London’s Starfleet Command headquarters, other planets, and multiple starships.  Between playing BBC’s brilliant Sherlock Holmes (2010-2017)…

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The Quote That Convinced Me I Could Become a Writer.

04/02/2024

John Gardner, “On Becoming a Novelist,” 1983.  (Forgive his dated language. And the bullet points are mine): Gardner says that the storyteller is “composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: …

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Arrival: Movie Review

03/16/2024

2016, 13+ on Amazon Prime and IMDb  What a gentle but thrilling ride! This is the alien movie I’ve always wanted, catering to my entertainment palate: violence at a minimum and thought-provoking-ness at a maximum, please and thank you.  This Oscar-winning…

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You Are the Music You Listen to

03/02/2024

At least in the moment. So use that to your advantage while writing. But producing a 500-page manuscript requires a feat from the brain akin to an athlete’s performance, and high-performing athletes do all they can to up their edge. …

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Interstellar: Movie Review

02/16/2024

2014, 16+ on Amazon, PG-13 on IMDb  This movie is eye-candy for my physics-undergrad heart, when I learned the basics of modelling astronomical phenomena. Interstellar is a physicist’s dream come true—to pour millions of the entertainment industry’s dollars into real-life visual modelling…

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Mistake #9 (Re: Overconfidence and Impairment)

02/02/2024

Let’s jump right in, shall we? 1. After eight professional edits, I felt pretty confident and ordered 100 author copies. And then realized my opening chapter was confusing, and there were too many points of view, and the cover wasn’t…

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Waterworld: Movie Review

01/16/2024

“He doesn’t have a name so death can’t find him.”  I saw a likely-abbreviated version of Waterworld in my teens or 20’s on TV and thought it was wacko. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it beyond the surface (pun unintended)…

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Mistake #8 (Re: Newsletters)

01/02/2024

Newsletters are a great way to connect with people— if done the right way. Stage 1. I began with gracious friends and family, and still, in my anxiety, wrote super short newsletters. My angst grew when my website opened subscriptions…

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Mistake #7 (Re: KDP/Amazon)

12/02/2023

The novel was written, the cover selected, the advanced copies out, and the file loaded onto KDP. I held my breath and . . . hit the button to publish. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! First, I changed my mind about the subtitle.  Titles…

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