Stephen L. Thompson's Blog, page 5

Writing so bad … it’s good?

I watch a bunch ofYouTube movie reviewers. One topic that many of them discuss at some point aremovies so bad they’re good. As they explain, the difference between bad-badmovies and good-bad movies is intention. The word that often comes up whendiscussing bad-bad movies is “cynical,” while the word for good-bad movies isoften “inept.” Bad-bad movies are made by people saying, “X is popular,

Voter registration drive and book sale

I know a lot ofpeople are tired of being told that every election for the past decade WILLDETERMINE THE VERY SURVIVAL OF THE NATION! But it’s true.  The fastest wayfor the anti-democratic forces to fully seize power is if We The People can’tbe bothered to vote.  And theanti-democratic forces already have too much power as it is.  To keep our democracy, we need to vote,

Random Writing Tips – Prewrite your bio

 I recently did somethingfor the first time in a couple of years: I submitted a story.  As of the posting of this, I’m still waitingto hear back.  But the submission processbrought back the scourge of many writers: the cover letter.  I don’t care for cover letters.  I prefer sites that just have a form you fillout with your name, story title, word count, etc. and they

Novels in a few sentences

I recently wentthrough some posts on an old blog of mine, and I came across this littlegem.  Years earlier, I had heard that agood exercise for creating pitches was to describe your novel in threesentences.  So I tried it with two of my ideas.  For my novel, Damocles, I came up withthe following:Most people gothrough their day-to-day lives worrying about “important” things:

To scheme, or to write?

I spent a decadeor so sloooowly building up a miniscule following on Twitter.  Now, Twitter had issues before Musk boughtit, but he didn’t fix the issues I had with it, and he made more.  So I left Twitter for Mastodon.  Is it better? Well, probably everyone I’ve interacted with on Mastodon Musk would claimis “woke,” so yeah.The main way Iused Twitter, is I had two

Free story idea – Star Jumping

I have a lot of ideas forstories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’sworth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting throughthem all.  I will admit that some of theideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could makesomething of them.  I’ll just never get achance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of

Random Writing Tips – Am I just writing gibberish?

 There is a project I’dlike to finish in the next few months.  Theidea of the project isn’t that difficult, it’s some essays on a subject I havea great interest in.  So I don’t have todeal with foreshadowing, or coming up with interesting characters, or any ofthe complexities of fiction writing.  Ijust have to coherently describe my thoughts on this subject.Of course,

My writing goals for 2024

 Four or fivemonths ago, in an attempt to get my act together, I set deadlines to finishfive of my projects.  Three of those deadlinesare this year.  I want to publish CollectionX, my tenth short story collection, a collection of essays on building a lunarbase, which I’m still hammering a title out for, and Rediscovery, a novella Istarted years ago about a writer

This hurt my brain

 Maybe the sea was too rough.

Writing Newsletter Fourth Quarter 2023

 Well, I finally finishedand published The Uncapped Pen, my collection of fifty stories dealingwith writing, in some way.  To try tobring some awareness to The Uncapped Pen, I reposted three stories thatwere in the “Maybe Pile” for the collection: “The Honeymoon’s Over,” “It’s Harder than it Looks,” and “It’s a Fine Line.” I also posted “Procrastination,”the idea for which I came