The generous and talented Brenda Drake has teamed up with Weronika Janczuk of the DFEO Literary Agency to create a cool contest about first lines. I’ve decided to toss my hat into the ring, so without further adieu here’s the first line from The Bleeding Cure, my current horror WIP:

Real friends are up for a kidnapping and won’t complain too much when you get down to the bloodletting.

There are a lot of other folks entering as well, and plenty of intriguing first lines, so head over to Brenda’s blog and get to clicking.

For the past six years, I’ve been enrolled in a grueling court reporting night school course, on top of working on a couple of novels, on top of a more-than full-time job that had me regularly working 60 hour weeks over the last couple of years. It was a horrible period of my life, marked by sacrifice, poor health, no free time to speak of, and a generalized hate of the world around me. It’s been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.

And now, I’m done. [Read more...]

In my last post, I wrote about picking writing tools and how to avoid cluttering your toolbox with unnecessary crap. After applying those rules to my own collection of work-avoiding toys, I’ve whittled my toolbox down to just a handful of things I couldn’t live without. [Read more...]

Once upon a time, I was a full-time writer. It was stressful, exciting, and profitable for quite a few years. But markets shifted and I made some bad choices that left me working a lot harder for a lot less money than I needed to keep my family afloat. In the end, I shot my writing career in the face, put away my pen and paper, bought some business casual attire, and entered the corporate work force. I became a model drone of modern society.

[Read more...]