Around 2013 I was very good at Excel, and Excel was slowly ruining me. The job needed SQL. I had built SQL up in my head into a wall — I'm a business person, I'd say, not a technical person, and they've got me doing technical things. It'll take too long. It's too hard. I'm … Continue reading Thirty Copies
I had a grown man's voice by the time I was fifteen. On the phone nobody ever knew. One afternoon somebody from a radio station called the house asking for my dad. He'd won something. All he had to do was be the one to claim it. Three words. This is him. Nobody in the … Continue reading This Is Him
I've been building a book about a detective who believes everything has a rational explanation, and I've dropped him into a world where magic is real on the first page. The detective is the Scarecrow. That's the joke underneath the whole thing — he isn't an outsider who wanders into Oz skeptical of it. He's … Continue reading The Rules Behind the Magic
7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 6 I read Phase Defiant somewhere between eight and ten times before I finished it. Not just to fix it — I'd already fixed a lot of it. I read it because I liked reading it. Every pass, it still struck me. I'd written the kind of book I … Continue reading The Voice I Like to Read
7-40 Challenge | Round 5 Day 4 Before I can write a character, I have to introduce myself to them. That sounds strange for people I invented, but it's the truest way I know to describe it. I have to spend time — not just in the story I want to tell, but in the … Continue reading Introducing Myself
