Rick Cook Jr.'s Blog, page 6
February 11, 2016
The Slump
It’s Thursday and I am having a bad time. Last year I wrote Motivationals every week, musingsthat helped keep me moving on my writing goals.
This year I have been struggling to keep up with everything and I blame it on a whole bunch of factors, some of them in my control, others not as much.
Mostly I think I’m just overtired and the thought of editing or even writing has my brain twisting itself in knots of inaction until I’m literally doing nothing worthwhile in my scant free time each day.
...
February 9, 2016
The Wings Take Shape – Part One
WELCOME back to Panning For Clouds! It’s Tuesday and I’ve got Part One of a new serial novella all set up down below. If you read “The Shape of Family” as it was posted last year, I have good and bad news for you. The good news is that you will soon be able to buy that novella on Amazon for a buck under the title “The Shapes We Take”. The bad news is that you cannot read it right this very moment as it is being prepared for Amazon Kindle. I hope to have that out by the end of the month!
Other...
February 7, 2016
Breaking the Author – Week Five
It’s February 7th, 2016. Five weeks of editing madness.
Goals achieved:
Maintain blog. – Completed. Complete Line Edits on Shapes 1 – 50% complete. Edit and submit Magic Carnival and Shibboleth short stories. Write Shapes 2 Part 1Goals for next week:
Maintain blog Complete 100% Line Edits on Shapes 1 Edit and submit Damp Summer Nights and Inside Darkness short stories Write Shapes 2 Part 2 Find cover art for Shapes 1 Tentatively begin looking over Gridfall for preliminary editing phase....February 4, 2016
The Convention Carousel
It’s February and I’m fresh off a weekend at PAX South, or Penny Arcade Expo in San Antonio.
This week for my Thursday Editorial I’m going to talk about the power of conventions and events for your chosen career in a creative field.
PAX South is a game convention, catering to video, pc, handheld, tabletop, dice, card. In other words, it’s my kind of convention. As a person who has been self-publishing his own fiction, done the occasional contract work, has a tabletop gaming company that I’m h...
January 31, 2016
Breaking the Author – Week Four
It’s January 31st, 2016. This post is coming to you via scheduler, as I will be attending PAX South this weekend and having no cares in the world for the craft of writing! Time to get my game on.
*Ahem* A month gone and what do I have to show for it? Let’s find out!
The goals I hoped to achieve this week are as follows:
Maintain blog. – Completed. Complete Line Edits on Shapes 1 – 25% complete. Another round of edits on Shibboleth and Damp Summer Nights, the short stories I’ve been tinkering...January 28, 2016
Media Medley – January 2016
It’s the last Thursday of the month, and this year as I mentioned before I will be doing something a little different with my month-end Thursday posts. Instead of talking about just one piece of media that inspired me throughout the month, I will be breaking down all the movies, TV shows, books, comics, games, and whatever else I consumed during the previous month, talking about each one briefly and what I liked or disliked about it, with a single recommendation at the end.
So let’s jump righ...
January 24, 2016
Breaking the Author – Week Three
Third week tucked into my belt for this year’s authorial challenge, Breaking the Author!
I was sick for most of this week, and unlike last year when I was sick, I didn’t force myself to complete daily goals to the detriment of my health. So while I had a couple extra things early in the week I was hoping to get around to, I just didn’t have the health for it this week.
The goals I wanted to achieve were thus:
Finish first-pass edits on Shapes 1. – Completed this Tuesday night. Plot out Shape...January 21, 2016
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
It’s Thursday and I want to talk about a particular experience I had over the last month or so that is relevant to my current editing goals.
In December of last year I was doing my best to hit my daily goal of words written, because I had a novel I wanted to finish and a year of writing to smash to pieces. I was successful at both of those, but right there in the middle of it all I had some random inspiration and wrote a short story.
I haven’t posted the short story on the blog, nor have I su...
January 17, 2016
Breaking the Author – Week Two
I’ve completed the second week of this year’s challenge, Breaking the Author, and now you get to see me brag about it a bit!
This week’s goals mostly centered around the shapeshifter novella. I edited roughly 50 pages this week, and I have another 25 or so to go for a completed first pass on edits. The first pass is mostly correcting inconsistencies and looking for things that are obviously wrong or that I knew I was going to change already. After the major revisions to story and character ar...
January 14, 2016
Carving Your Own Bones
It’s Thursday, time to jam!
So I haven’t talked about it too officially yet, but the way I plan to run my Thursday posts is a little different than last year. For 1K a Day I did Motivationals and mini-reviews. This year I won’t be doing many Motivationals, instead filling the Thursday slot with more craft-centric posts. The various facets of being an author that perhaps you don’t think about as often.
Editing, Formatting, Cover Art, Line Edits, Proofing, Blog Tours, Conventions, Book Signings...
