Over the last few weeks, as an experiment, I’ve been talking to a writing coach, specifically, Cathy Yardley of Rock Your Writing. I started out just wanting some accountability, you know, I will get this thing done by next week. Then next week comes and she asks me, “Did you get this thing done this […]
Exhaustion & Updates
So I’m coming up on the halfway mark for this whole gestating-a-human-being thing, and I’m learning (slowly and painfully) that I can’t do quite as much creative work as I would like to do at any given time. Pregnancy is exhausting, for one. Bone-crushingly exhausting. I literally spent ten minutes this afternoon fantasizing about taking […]
Returning to Odyssey
I was fortunate enough to be asked to return last week to teach at the Odyssey Writing Workshop, my alma mater, four years after I graduated in 2011. It was an incredible experience to see the workshop from the other side of the table, to interact with the students, and to see student critiques. The […]
The New Working Adventure
After the difficult winter I’ve had, I’m finding myself missing the old office job more than I’d care to admit. Working at home can be lonely at times, and personal and work can bleed together. The laundry can demand to be done at 2:00 pm, for example, and the toilets need to be scrubbed instead […]
Resolute for New Year’s
I’ve sat down to write this blog post a few times, and never quite known what to say, or how to say it. It’s been a crazy rough few months in my world. Depending on how you count, we’ve now had 3 or 4 different family emergencies since the beginning of December. I had a […]
Too Many Choices
There are two great truths in any life: Given enough time, resources, and energy, you can do anything. There will never be enough time, resources, and energy to do everything. I am running up against the second rule like crazy right now. I have literally a pile of “Someday/Maybe” work and an even bigger pile of […]
Promotion Tricks I Learned From DragonCon
Monkey see, monkey do. Or, more accurately, when a human sees someone failing, the human tries something different. The human sees someone succeeding, then he/she does exactly the same thing. Our ability to learn from the examples of others can get us in trouble sometimes, as we all stampede towards a particular stock or children’s […]
Editorial Letter
On Monday I received my editorial letter, that lovely document from an editor where they tell you what they’d like from your book in revision. Since I’d heard a lot of horror stories from other writers, I was nervous going into it. I had mentally prepared myself for anything from a major gut of the […]
A Dream Realized – Two Book Deal
Well, the announcement came out yesterday, so I can finally talk about my big news! Here’s the quote from Publisher’s Lunch, which covers the latest sales of books to publishers: Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semi-finalist Alex Hughes’s first two books in a dystopian thriller series featuring a telepath forced to assist a hostile Atlanta police […]
Update & Happiness
I’ve been holding off on updating the blog since I’ve gotten to Odyssey, partly because of the intense workload, and party because I’ve been waiting to share the details of the happy phone call I got on the first day. Still waiting for some of the details on that to work out (more details later) […]
