Aside from a couple early practice novels, Akard Drearstone was my first real novel and my attachment to it has been deep. Was gestation to publication really forty-two years? Well, this novel has been on my mind since 1975; in … Continue reading →
I’ve finished good drafts of the Three Legacy Novels outlined in the June 18 blog post. The question was: could I make the older manuscripts of Jump Grenade, Akard Drearstone, and Sortmind into fully modern, high quality expressions? Was there … Continue reading →
Why should writers’ blogs, including my own, continue to spout, in glorious marketing-ese dialect, a sort of Chamber of Commerce civic boosterism about our stunning writing careers and our usually boring buy-my-book blurbs? Why should I post as if everything … Continue reading →
If anyone had paid attention to Jack Commer’s son before this day, it was to jeer that the kid had emerged non compos mentis from his stunt in Alpha Centauri, that he was an egomaniacal fool and that it served … Continue reading →
The idea for CommWealth came from the first part of these notes from a dream (“Their Satanic Majesties Computer Software Guide”), although successive revisions changed much of the plot. The second part, “The Tremendous Romance,” wasn’t used in the novel. … Continue reading →
I’ve always thought of the characters in CommWealth as an ensemble cast in a movie, where accomplished actors divide the plot between them and no one actor has the lead role. I didn’t intend this approach from the beginning, but … Continue reading →
This summer’s Draft 7 of Sortmind completely changed the old library-centric plot of the original novel, and it was only after a small amount of grief that I finally knew I had to let go of the following mini-chapter from … Continue reading →
I haven’t posted a blog entry since the North Texas Book Festival entry of April 7, an unnervingly long time to go dark. However, the seed of darkness came the day of the April 9 festival itself; in order to … Continue reading →
It hasn’t quite sunk in yet that I’ve published a literary, adult novel. This is not to denigrate my Jack Commer science fiction novels or CommWealth, which is also a literary novel but borders the science fiction and dystopian genres. … Continue reading →
I was pointedly hard-nosed about Jipo Jarg in the first version of The Soul Institute as I strove to delineate Jipo and Derrick’s bitter corporate marriage. Maybe Jipo was all shadow-projection on my part, and the below excerpts probably reinforce … Continue reading →
