writing schedule | writing schedule

Aug.26.2011 A Time to Cast Away: The Best Time to Edit I'm a morning person, but that doesn't mean morning is the best time of day for me to edit. Mornings are generally split into two types of time: writing on the train as I commute to work, and doing as much as possible as fast as possible on days I work from home. For me, the best time to edit is...	Aug.12.2011 Writers Need Decisive Indolence My wife is in labor. Though by the time you read this, she’ll probably have delivered a baby girl. In days gone by, fathers hung around in the waiting room sharing cigars with new fathers. I’m glad that’s no longer a tradition – if I wanted to suck on something long and dark, I surely wouldn’t be...
Feb.18.2011 Interview with J. Conrad Guest, Author of Backstop and One Hot January How much of a story do you have in mind before you start writing it? I start with a protagonist and his conflict; most times I have the ending in mind and simply write to it, although often the ending is amended depending on what happens prior to my getting there. Everything before that – the...	Sep.16.2010 Writers, no email until lunch Raymond Chandler wrote that a writer shouldn’t read letters until lunchtime. The energy that ought to go into his novel would be diverted to correspondence.If email had been invented 50 years earlier, we might never have had “The Long Goodbye.”Email has an itching urgency that letters don’t have....
Dec.11.2008 Stay on track by keeping track I finished Chapter 11 of Bewitched & Betrayed last night, and I've realized it's time to do what I've done on my past two books -- write a short synopsis of each chapter to remind me what I've written up to this point so I don't get off track. I open a new Word document, go through each chapter...