Writing Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Sorry I missed posting yesterday, but I was down in Madrid catching up with old friends and enjoying the cafe culture. Now I'm back in Santander awaiting the next ocean gale while my virtual book tour continues. I've had two more stops and both focus on writing post-apocalyptic fiction.

First up is Constructing A Destroyed World at the Post-Modern Pulps page. I've also done a post on Post-Apocalyptic Fiction: What it is and What it Isn't over at The Five Year Project. Head on over and check them out, and feel free to leave a comment. I'll be lurking there, ready to bushwhack you and steal your food and gear. All's fair in the apocalypse. . .

Image courtesy NASA.

Helping out with National Novel Writing Month

I've started a thread on the National Novel Writing Month website for writing a Civil War novel during NaNoWriMo.

If you're writing about the American Civil War, I'll be happy to answer your questions if I can. I've written two books about the Civil War for Osprey Publishing and numerous magazine articles for magazines such as Missouri Life and America's Civil War. I also have a novel set in Civil War Missouri titled A Fine Likeness.

My research focus is on the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi Theater and guerrilla warfare. I'll try to answer any questions posed to me, however. I've already had a couple of good ones. Please don't ask questions that can easily be researched online, though. I'm going to be a wee bit busy this month!


Image of bombardment of Fort Sumter courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Indie Life: Keeping it Real

As indie writers we're all looking for attention, we're all looking to set ourselves apart from the pack.

There are good ways and bad ways to do this. Good ways include writing amazing novels like Hugh Howey's Wool, which I'm absorbed in right now. You can also be a blogging powerhouse like Alex Cavanaugh, or write engaging series for niche readerships like Jack Badelaire.

Sadly, there are more wrong ways than right ways. Review inflation, misleading advertising, spamming, all end up hurting the writer more than helping.

One old trick that I bumped into yesterday is the "Pulitzer Prize nominee". Someone on my Facebook feed was bragging that a certain erotica book had been nominated for the 2014 Pulitzer in fiction.

Um, no. "Pulitzer nominee" is an old scam. Since people can send in their own stuff, they are essentially nominating themselves. Not everything that's submitted counts as a nominee, only the finalists, and there's no finalist list for the 2014 Pulitzer Award for Fiction, as the deadline for submissions only passed on the first of this month.

Claiming to be a "Pulitzer nominee" is a tired old trick that writers have been using for years. The author and publisher are doing themselves no favors by claiming this, no media outlet is going to pick this up (journalists all know this con), and the idea of the stuffy old Pulitzer committee nominating an erotica novel for the fiction award is downright ludicrous.

The Pulitzer Prize's own website says:

"Nominated Finalists are selected by the Nominating Juries for each category as finalists in the competition. The Pulitzer Prize Board generally selects the Pulitzer Prize Winners from the three nominated finalists in each category. The names of nominated finalists have been announced only since 1980. Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. No information on entrants is provided.

"Since 1980, when we began to announce nominated finalists, we have used the term "nominee" for entrants who became finalists. We discourage someone saying he or she was "nominated" for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us."

This sort of thing only hurts the reputation of indie publishers, and I doubt it leads to many sales. I mean, have you ever bought an erotica novel because it was "nominated" for a Pulitzer?

Keep it real, friends. It will help us all out in the long run.

Guest Post: Using Real Cultures in Fantasy Fiction

Today I've invited blogger buddy A.J. Walker to talk about his new fantasy novel, The Maze of Mist. I've guest blogged for his Medieval Mondays series several times on topics such as medieval handgonnes and medieval weapons in the Civil War, so it's great to have him here. He's going to talk about using real cultures in fantasy fiction. Take it away, A.J.!

Fantasy fiction is a blend of the familiar and the strange. The familiar helps the reader construct a framework for envisioning the story. It's no surprise, then, that most high fantasy settings are reminiscent of medieval Europe. Writers usually pick medieval England, France, and the Norse region as their settings, and while I love all these cultures, I've always felt there were plenty of others that were being underused.

For my Timeless Empire series, the setting is reminiscent of medieval Spain. That makes it a little different than your typical fantasy novel, but still familiar.

I went further afield with The Maze of Mist. The protagonist, Metis Itxaron, is a mixed-race prince, the son of a goblin mother and a human father. Goblinkin culture is a mix of Native American, the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, the prehistoric Kurgan culture, and a fair amount of my own weirdness. The human culture is medieval European. I wanted something for my reader to find familiar!

I also throw in a new race, the mysterious Amhara from beyond the Southern Sea. These explorers have solved the mystery of the Maze of Mist, a strange labyrinth of fog that has baffled navigators for all of recorded history. For this culture, I borrowed some of Sean's experience and made them Ethiopian. If you're a regular reader of Sean's travel writing you know he's a regular visitor to that ancient land and has even written a book about Ethiopian history.

So why Ethiopia? Because as an archaeologist I know this land is home to one of the oldest and most advanced civilizations in the world. Even Heroditus lists it as one of the great cultures of his time. Yet it is almost entirely ignored in Western history books.

The kingdom of Abyssinia went through several different incarnations that had several similarities. The land was made up of several tribes and held together by a ruler that did not have absolute power except in times of dire emergency such as a foreign invasion. Women enjoyed a relatively high status and compared to medieval Europe (although there weren't female warriors like I have in my novel) and studies such a geography, painting and literature were highly developed.

When my protagonist goes off with these newcomers on a diplomatic mission, he gets to sample their food and drink, learn about their world view, and generally immerse himself in their culture. He's not just journeying across an ocean, he passing from one culture to another. The ancient Abyssinian kingdoms are a perfect model for a civilization that your typical fantasy character would find both strange and alluring.

Plus they had cool swords and strong booze. You gotta have cool swords and strong booze in a fantasy novel!


Thanks, A.J.! Do you have a new release you'd like to shout about? Go to the How Can I Help You? page to learn how, well, I can help you. . .

Indie Life: Ramping up that wordcount

As I've said before, I've been focusing more on fiction this year with a goal of writing 200,000 words of fiction in 2013, which sounds impossible until you realize it's only 550 words a day. Check out the progress bar at the bottom of this blog to see how I've been doing.

Well, it looks like I may not only meet that goal, but exceed it. Thanks to changes at one of my regular jobs, the travel blog Gadling, I'm now writing only a fraction of what I used to for them. There are fewer posts on Gadling now and no features. Since I was mainly a feature writer, that means I have lots more time on my hands.

So besides looking for work, I'm also writing a lot more fiction. The best marketing for an indie writer is their next book. I intend to get lots more out there. Not only am I getting out the next book in the House Divided series, which will be loosely connected to my published historical novel A Fine Likeness, I'm also working on my Tangier novel, a post-apocalyptic series, and I just finished a short story I'm sending to an anthology once I've had my beta readers look at it. I have plenty more in the works too.

Dean Wesley Smith has a great post on the myths about writing quickly. Lots of great and not-so-great writers are tremendously prolific, often using pen names to keep from saturating the market. While Dean overstates the case about not editing, I do think most writers agonize far too much over every word. Get it written, get it clean, and get it out there. Most people think that More Time=Better Book. I believe that equation should be changed to More Effort=Better Book, with effort being mostly independent of time. Focus and experience are the key elements.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments section, and stay tuned for more fiction by yours truly!

A humblebrag and some free writing advice

While writing a short story I spelled "prestidigitation" correctly on the first try. That doesn't make me a real writer. What makes me a real writer is that it put me in a good mood all morning!

One of my articles just came out online. Check out the latest issue of Funds for Writers and read my Mediocre Photographer’s Guide to Professional Photography.

Halfway to my goal of writing 200,000 words of fiction in 2013

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my writing goals for 2013 is to write 200,000 words of fiction. While that sounds like a lot, it's actually only 550 words a day. Quite doable.

Despite it being doable I only just passed the halfway mark last week. Yesterday I counted and found I'd done 101,330 words. Of course we're more than halfway through the year but my pace is picking up. Part of this is, sadly, because I have less work at Gadling. A change in editorial direction means they will be publishing much less travel writing.

So what have I been working on? A book set in the same world as A Fine Likeness, some short stories, some other work I don't want to talk about yet, and of course my Tangier novel. That last one made up for a whopping 26,000 words of my total, written in an intense ten-day retreat.

Back to work, only 98,670 words to go!

More on writing in Tangier

As I mentioned in my last post, I just got back from a writing retreat in Tangier. Not only was it hugely productive but it shifted my thinking about my career.

I originally got into writing with the dream of having a successful career writing both fiction and nonfiction. Well, the nonfiction part happened and the fiction didn't. Oh, sure, I've had several short stories published and a novel that has received good reviews and poor sales, but the vast majority of my effort has gone into developing my careers as a history and travel writer.

I need to change that. No, I'm not quitting my day job unless one of you happens to be rich and wants to be a literary patron, I'm just shifting emphasis. You see, I was really happy for those ten days on Tangier. I was doing nothing but writing a novel and getting into random situations that informed my novel. Like meeting Arabs, Berbers, and Saharawis. Like meeting French millionaires and children addicted to sniffing glue. Like wandering through the market at night and discovering that it smells of popcorn.

I'd spend long hours in cafes and in the courtyard of my pension writing it all down and working some of these details into the developing story. I delved into my protagonist's head. I immersed myself in the story.

I haven't been doing enough of that. Over my 13 year writing career I've squished my fiction writing time in between my nonfiction research and writing. It's always been secondary; now it's going to be a priority.

So I've changed my habits. Now the first thing I do in the morning is fiction, not email or blog posts or the thousands of other things that demand my attention. The email is being drastically cut down. When I returned after ten days offline I found more than 500 new messages in my inbox. In half an hour I was done looking at them. I read and responded to all the important one and the ones from friends and deleted the rest. Yes, it's really that simple.

Have you had a shift in your writing career? What prompted it?

Back from my writing retreat in Tangier

I'm baaaack!

After ten amazing days in Tangier, I'm back in Spain. I went there on a writing retreat to work on my next book, a novel set in contemporary Tangier.

I cut myself off from the internet, music, video, and all those other distractions that are only important when we have them around. I wrote 21,000 words in longhand and outlined the whole novel. It's amazing the progress you can make when you have nothing else to do.

It was nice to fully reconnect with my fiction, something I haven't been able to do for far too long thanks to all the other writing responsibilities that demand my time. Writing longhand was wonderful too. It made me write more slowly and focus on each word and phrase.

Of course I didn't spend all my time hunched over a notebook, although I did carry it everywhere. I explored the city more than I had time for on my previous visit and met lots of interesting folks who I'm looking forward to seeing again.

Yep, I'm already planning my next trip. This time I'm going to rent a cheap room in the medina and stay for a whole month, probably in November. The kind folks at the American Legation have given me access to their excellent library, complete with a desk and wifi. If I'm going for a month, I'll have to take my computer. I don't think my editors would take kindly to me disappearing for that long!

Indie Life: Let's Stop Review Inflation

Anyone who has been to university is familiar with the phenomenon of grade inflation: students are given better grades than they deserve in order to make the department or university look good. There's a similar process going on in indie publishing that I call review inflation.

It's simple: an indie writer gets her friends to give the book five-star reviews, lavishing praise on the book. Sometimes it's quite obvious. I've seen books that have only been published for a day that somehow have half a dozen reviews, all of them five stars. The idea is that this will help sales.

In the end, this hurts the author and indie writers in general. When real readers buy the book, they're often disappointed and take out their sense of betrayal with especially bad reviews. Readers are also getting more sophisticated. I've seen more than one review on Amazon or B&N which complains there are too many fake reviews for a book.

It's also just plain dishonest, and trying to pull one over on your readership is not going to help your career in the long term. I have never asked my friends for reviews. For my Civil War novel A Fine Likeness, only one reviewer is someone I know. ACLopez is a friend of mine. I didn't ask her to write a review, but she did anyway and gave it five stars. I'd think she really enjoyed the book and was probably tickled that much of the action took place in her county, but would she have given it five stars if she didn't know me? Probably not.

The only other unsolicited review from a friend was for The Night the Nazis Came to Dinner and other Dark Tales. On Amazon UK, Critch gave me only three stars and said, "He needs to improve if his fiction is to equal his non-fiction, but there are glimpses of potential in this collection."

Well, no review inflation with that guy!

Guest Post: Researching a Shared World Alternate History

Today we have an interesting guest post from an old writing buddy of mine from my Tucson days. I first met David Lee Summers at Tuscon, a great local f/sf/h con. I was immediately struck by his boundless enthusiasm and dedication to the fan community. He's such a nice guy I even forgave him when he rejected one of my short stories for his magazine!

He's come out with several books over the years and is here to talk about his latest.


Last year, Robert E. Vardeman asked me to write a novella in a steampunk shared world he created called Empires of Steam and Rust.  As a steampunk author who has read and admired Bob's work since before my career began, I leapt at the opportunity.

The concept of the world is that it's an alternate 1915.  Queen Victoria is still on the throne and getting younger.  The Russian Revolution failed and the Czar is still on the throne.  The Meiji Restoration never happened and there are still Samurai in Japan.  Teddy Roosevelt is still president of the United States and has ambitions of creating an American Empire.  In the meantime, holes are opening up in the fabric of reality.  Strange substances leak out of these holes, such as gasses that defy description.  In some cases, the holes serve as portals to another alternate world.  My first challenge was to decide what story to tell in this alternate world.

A few days later, I happened upon a T-shirt my wife brought me from Palomas, Mexico with a photo of Pancho Villa dressed jauntily in a pith helmet and cravat, very similar to the public domain photo shown here.  This was virtually a steampunk vision of Pancho Villa.  I realized I could tell the story of Pancho Villa in this world.

This project essentially required three stages of research.  The first stage of research involved getting to know the Pancho Villa of history.  I watched some documentaries, looked up some history on the web and at my local library.  Villa clearly was a larger-than-life figure.  He was a man who loved beautiful women and liked to overwhelm his opponents with the speed of cavalry charges.  I did my best to understand the motivations of the men who surrounded Pancho Villa such as Álvaro Obregón, Rodolfo Fierro, and John J. Pershing.


The second stage of research involved getting to know the alternate world Bob Vardeman had developed.  Bob, with input from several of the Empires of Steam and Rust authors, including Steve Sullivan assembled a "bible" explaining what was going on in different parts of the world.  The bible mentioned two things of interest to my story.  The United States had invaded Mexico and no one had yet invented airplanes.  Only airships had been developed.  I knew that Pancho Villa would seize any opportunity he could to create a "cavalry of the air" to go after invading American airships.  Of course, I also read Bob Vardmeman's novella Gateway to Rust and Ruin and Stephen D. Sullivan's novella Heart of Steam and Rust, both set in this alternate world to understand the world better.


Finally, I decided to set a large portion of the conflict on the U.S./Mexican border at the towns of Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Mexico, a place Pancho Villa was known to have been.  One of the landmarks of Douglas is the Hotel Gadsden.  It was a classic old hotel used by ranchers in the area at the time of Pancho Villa.  I was fortunate enough to be invited down for a book signing in Douglas at the hotel, which allowed me to do the third stage of research, which was a visit to the location of the story.

Inside the lobby of the Hotel Gadsden is a beautiful marble staircase.  There are two chips in the marble halfway up the first flight.  In the photo, you see my daughters posing with the chips in question.  A sign in the lobby claims the chips were made when Pancho Villa rode his horse up the staircase.  Later research has since cast some doubt on whether this really happened, particularly since the Hotel Gadsden suffered a bad fire after Pancho Villa died.  The hotel owners claim the staircase survived the fire.  Whatever the truth, it was too good a story not to use in my novella, especially since I had a scene that would allow Pancho Villa to ride up the staircase, guns blazing!

For me, part of the fun of writing alternate history is to gain new insights into the people and places of history by imagining them in circumstances that weren't the same as the ones we're familiar with.  Even though the events are different than those of history, it still means getting to know the characters involved well enough that you can imagine how they would react in new circumstances.

My novella of Pancho Villa in an alternate 1915 is Revolution of Air and Rust.  I'd love to hear what you think of this alternate Pancho Villa and his comrades.  The novella is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

Indie Life: How I use social media in my writing career

Today I'm participating in the Indelibles Indie Life blog hop. On the second Wednesday of every month we talk about various aspects of being an indie author, and luckily the A to Z blogfest is dedicated to the letter I today.

Social media is part of my life as a writer. I blog, both here and for Gadling, the leading travel blog on the web. I also have a Twitter feed and a public Facebook page.

I do set up certain limits to my social media presence, however, because I recognize that it can only do so much for my career and can easily become a waste of time. If you look at my feeds you'll notice that I don't use them as often as some people, and have fewer followers than most.

The main reason for this is that I don't play the "follow me and I'll follow you" game. I don't see a point to that. I want followers who are actually interested in my writing, and I only follow feeds that I'm genuinely interested in. Even then I don't read them on a daily basis. I simply don't have the time. And even when I do read them I only comment when I have something to add to the conversation.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm trying to get beyond the indie author's echo chamber. While I love my fellow indies, our community runs the danger of being a closed one. That's one of the reasons I'm also getting more into Goodreads. I like the conversations on there and I think it offers a great way to connect with readers.

You might also want to look at my post on Twitter for writers.

Indie Life: Reaching Beyond the Indie Authors' Echo Chamber

Today I'm participating in the Indelibles Indie Life blog hop. On the second Wednesday of every month we talk about various aspects of being an indie author. So let's get to it!

As every author knows, marketing a book is as hard as writing one. One trap many people fall into is to communicate only with other writers, a trend one author whose name I now forget called "the indie authors' echo chamber".

It's understandable. These were the people in the chatrooms and newsgroups who supported you as you wrote your book. These are the folks who followed your blog and you followed theirs. They feel your pain and share your joys. There's only one problem:

There are too few of them.

Sure, some indie authors will buy your book. Some may even review it. But they constitute a tiny fraction of your potential readership. You need to make your voice carry beyond the indie authors' echo chamber and reach the world at large.

There are many ways to do this and I'm still learning. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated. My main marketing platform right now is blogging. I'm a professional travel blogger for Gadling so it comes easily to me. On my own blog I try to make my posts have a wide appeal to my target readership. You'll see few posts about writing. There are plenty of other bloggers who do that well, like Cynthia Hope Clark and Dean Wesley Smith. I want to reach readers as well as writers.

I also do lots of guest posts on non-writing blogs. One of my favorites is that run by Osprey Publishing, which publishes my military history books. Since my Civil War novel has a military theme, this is a good audience, and of course I always mention my novel in the "about the author" section! I even focused on the book for a post on Weaving Military History into Fiction. Yeah, my traditional publisher let me push my indie book. They're cool.

Genre magazines often have blogs and they're a good place to pitch since they have readers who already like your genre. One of my faves is Black Gate. I've done a few posts for them, including one on Spiritualism during the American Civil War. Smaller blogs with a wide appeal such a Guerrilla Explorer are also good bets. They published my post on Did Jesse James Fake His Own Death?

All my guest posts include a links to my novel and personal blog. I also tweet about each guest post, using appropriate hashtags to reach beyond my followers.

So. . .how do YOU reach beyond the indie authors' echo chamber?

Civil War Horror blog wins the Liebster Award!

O.K., it ain't the Oscars, but this still makes me happy. Blogger buddy Sapper Joe over at Sapper Joe's Wargaming & Toys has awarded me the Liebster Award, a recognition of a fun blog with fewer than 200 followers. I may have few followers, but I have cool ones!

This being a blog award, it comes with some rules:

 -----------------------------------------------
Copy and paste the award on your blog linking it to the blogger who has given it to you.

Pass the award to your top 5 favourite blogs with less than 200 followers by leaving a comment on one of their posts to notify them that they have won the award and listing them on your own blog.

Sit back and bask in that warm fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing that you have just made someone's day!
 -----------------------------------------------

Only five, huh? That's tricky. I know a lot more deserving bloggers than that! Here are my picks:

The 2nd Kansas State Militia and the Battle of The Blue: You knew I was going to pick a Trans-Miss blog, didn't you? Jeff Bell digs into the little-known history of this Civil War battle and what happened to his ancestor John F. Bell and his comrades. Bell (the modern one) doesn't post very often but I immediately click on his posts when he does. I've been studying the Trans-Mississippi Theater for years and he always teaches me something new!

The Sable Arm: Jimmy Price blogs about black soldiers in the Civil War. This is another blogger who I wish posted more often. There's a lot of good material here, including a fascinating series on whether Robert E. Lee's slaves joined the Union army.

The Post Modern Pulp Blog: Jack Badelaire is becoming an indie publishing machine. He loves all those men's adventure novels of the 60s, 70s, and 80s and he's busy writing new ones in the old style. He blogs about his favorite genre and throws in some reviews and military history to boot.

Mad Padre: A Canadian Army chaplain blogging about spirituality, wargaming, books, and travel. He has a second blog called Mad Padre's Wargames Page that's also worth a visit. I'm not a wargamer, but his posts there are entertaining that I read them anyway. I can't seem to find his real name. He just goes by "Mad Padre." I wonder what his regiment thinks of that?

Donna's Book Pub: Donna Volkenannt is a Missouri writer whose short stories and articles have appeared all over the place, including the Chicken Soup books. She blogs about her work, the writing life, and posts calls for submissions. If you're looking for a blog about the writing life from a hardworking pro, this is a good one to follow. She's at 165 followers; let's see if this award can push her over 200!

GUEST POST: Civil War Mystery: Objects in photographs are closer than they appear

Today I have an interesting guest post by Kathryn Hohmann, author of the Civil War novel Soldiers Rest, which like my own novel features photography as a central theme. She offers some tips on writing historical fiction. You can learn more about her on her webpage and Goodreads page. Thanks for coming, Kathryn!

Like a resident of a coastal town who rarely gets to the beach, I was surrounded by hallowed ground but never visited the Civil War battlefields of central Maryland. On weekend bicycle trips, I was more worried about the hilly terrain than the interpretive markers along the route. Although I sensed that the landscape possessed some eerie quality, I gave the matter little consideration.

Then I relocated to Montana and on a backcountry outing, I broke my leg and ended up bed-ridden and bored. I rented The Civil War by Ken Burns and found myself engrossed. As the series comes to an end, Burns touches on the years after the war. To illustrate how Americans turned away from memories of the conflict, he includes a remarkable image of glass plate negatives of Civil War photographs, scrapped and salvaged for the silver emulsions on their surfaces and recycled into glass panes for solariums.

These photographs –our collective heritage from the Civil War– dulled by years of sunlight and rain, were the inspiration for my historical novel, Soldiers Rest. The years spent writing my book and becoming conversant in a slice of the Civil War taught me a few lessons that I’d like to share.   

Hit the books – hard. Readers of historical fiction will spot your blunders. Study up, seek help and don’t be afraid to make revisions, especially if you’re in the e-book space. Read, research and read some more.

Take a small bite. History of any period is a sweeping canvas and unless you’re a Civil War scholar, you may want to consider limiting yourself to a small space of geography and time. I chose to concentrate on the aftermath of a single overlooked conflict, the Battle of South Mountain, part of the 1862 Maryland campaign. The event rarely gets the attention it deserves, overshadowed as it is by Antietam. The Battle of South Mountain was small enough to be a good candidate for my story, and focused enough so that when it came time for annual commemorations, the events were intimate and engaging, and there was little chance I would be lost in the crowd, as I might have been at Shiloh or Gettysburg.

Guest blogging about Weaving Military History Into Fiction over at Osprey Publishing

My military history publisher Osprey Publishing has been kind enough to let me do a guest post about Weaving Military History Into Fiction. Yes, my nonfiction publisher is letting me talk about my fiction work, even though they have a fiction imprint! Osprey has always been great to work with and this just proves it. Head on over and check it out.

Fantasy ebook sale and writing tips

It's a sunny weekend here in Santander and we're enjoying the last few beach days before the winter sets in. I still have time to make a few announcements, though! Fellow archaeologist/blogger A.J. Walker is having a fantasy ebook sale of the first two volumes of his Timeless Empire series. Check them out; they're only on sale until Monday!

Ninja Captain Alex Cavanaugh did a great guest post over at My First Book about marketing your work. Lots of good advice there.

Last but not least, I discovered an interesting blog while scrolling through Twitter. Yesenia Vargas did a post about useful twitter hashtags for writers. It included a few I didn't know about.

Do you have an announcement that's at least vaguely related to the subject of this blog? Drop me a line and I'd be happy to spread the word!

Rewriting a battle scene

I got back into the next novel of the House Divided series, of which A Fine Likeness was the first. As I mentioned before, travel and a nonfiction deadline made my writing get stretched too thin so it's been a couple of weeks since I've been able to work on any fiction. It was nice to get back into it!

My first project was to rewrite a battle scene that's been bugging me. It's a fight between the USS Essex, captained by Richard Addison's son (whom we only met through letters in the first book) and some bushwhackers on the banks of the Missouri River. The bushwhackers have a cannon and for plot reasons I realized I needed to move that cannon from the south bank to the north bank.

It changed the dynamic of the fight completely! Just one little detail like that and I had to do a major rewrite of the entire scene--shifting paragraphs, editing the descriptions of who was doing what when, where they were looking, and who was posted where. If you're writing a complex fight scene, take my advice and get it right the first time!

Colored engraving of the Battle of Vicksburg courtesy U.S. Naval Historical Center - Photo #: NH 76557-K. My battle isn't as grandiose as this one. :-)

A writing podcast worth listening to

Longtime writing buddy and fellow traveler Cynthia Hope Clark is the guest on the latest episode of the What the Glass Contains podcast. She reads from her novel Lowcountry Bribe and gives some great advice on writing. One of my favorite points is that the more you write, the better you get. Don't sweat it, just practice. Seems like a no-brainer, but a lot of writers need to be reminded of that. Head on over and have a listen! Also check out the guest post she did on history as the foundation of any novel.

Writing Pitfall #2: Talking More Than Writing

Let's face it--writers are full of themselves. How else could we assume that people will actually pay to read the products of our thoughts and imagination? It's a pretty big assumption.

So being a bit arrogant is actually part of the muse, but one flaw I see in a lot of beginning writers is that they spend more time talking about being a writer than actually writing. They boast to all their friends about the great novel they're working on, when in fact they haven't made it past page ten after five months of "work". They get into flame wars on newsgroups, arguing about all the tired controversies that crop up continually in such places, when they should be saving that energy for their writing.

My advice--shut up and write!

Yes, this blog counts as talking about writing, but I spend about sixty hours a week writing, researching, editing, or pitching, so I've earned the right to gab a bit. :-)

Cynthia Hope Clark talked about this on her blog recently, along with other common mistakes. She makes the point that you can end up diluting the creative process if you talk about your work in progress too much.