Stephen L. Thompson's Blog, page 52

Alternate Enigma

Recently, I read through my old writing notebooks looking for lost story ideas. While doing that, I came across the original idea I had for “Enigma.” Instead of a cube, the artifact was to be this bizarre sculpture with all kinds of branches and nobody would have a clue as to what it was. The story then was to end several hundred million years ago, where we find the object was made by an alien art student. It’s a giant penis. The student is threatened with expulsion from the school if he does...

Photo Fridays – Bond

I couldn’t resist.

Novels in a few sentences

Here’s another little gem I found in my old writing notebooks. A few years ago, I heard somewhere that a good exercise for creating pitches was to describe your novel in three sentences. So I tried it with two of my ideas. The first is for None of Them Knew the Color of the Sky, which I’m half done with and hope to finish next year. This one I did in only one sentence.

Will a treasure from the past be enough to unite the survivors of a nuclear war; or, are arrogance, mistrust, and hatred too a...

Writing group prompt – Why I write

The one writing group I’m in has a prompt for every month. This month’s was “Why I write?” I came up with the following:

At first, I was going to say I write because it’s fun, but that’s not true. Yes, coming up with story ideas and exploring the plot possibilities is fun, but I’m taking writing to mean putting words on a page or a screen. Most times that is the opposite of fun, i.e., work. For the last few months I’ve been trying to write something every day, even if it’s just a sentence. But...

100 days of writing

Besides the election, today also marks 100 days straight of me writing. That means I have written something – sometimes just a sentence – every day since July 30th. In that time, I’ve written 21,028 words, or an average of 210 a day. That’s not an overwhelming amount, but if you do a little bit every day, you’ll eventually get done. I believe my current record is 144 days straight, so hopefully I can keep to this and set a new record. I’ll let you know.

135 free stories on Election Day

For Election Day, I’m offering my four story collections, A Man of Few Words, The All-You-Can-Read Buffet, Political Pies and “Brain for Rent and other stories,” free to download to Kindle. All together they contain 135 stories and they can be yours for $0.00. So after you vote, reward yourself with plenty of reading material.

What writing means to me

I’m going through my writing notebooks, and I came across something from several years ago I felt I should share. At a writing group meeting, we had an exercise of coming up with one word that describes what writing means to us. I debated between knowledge, immortality, and freedom. I was going to go with freedom, but the woman leading the group used that as an example, so I went with immortality instead. This is what I wrote.

The one thing I would like most in life would to be immortal. I wan...

Photo Fridays – A day to write

This was the view out my window this morning. I don’t think you can see the few snow flakes that were flying around at the time. So it’s looks like a good day to write, hopefully I can get to it.

Stephen L. Thompson’s October 2012 Newsletter

Howdy,

Welcome to my electronic newsletter, covering October 2012.

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My publication news for the past month:

Publication of my minianthology of five scifi stories “Brain for Rent and other stories” on Kindle.

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This month I wrote 5,081 words, giving me a yearly total so far of 77,569. I had hoped to hit 80,000 this month, but between being under the weather for a few days and being exhausted cutting firewood, I didn’t write as much as I wanted. I did, however, manage to write something ever...

Brain for Rent and other stories

I’ve just published a minianthology of five of my short, scifi stories. Here’s the description:

“Brain for Rent and other stories” is a collection of five, short scifi stories by Stephen L. Thompson giving a sampling of his writing. Included in the collection are: “Brain for Rent” about a ne’re-do-well failed writer with a conceptual implant who discusses his work with a young woman thinking of getting an implant herself. “The Demonstration” is about a different young woman wanting to show off...