Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Month: February 2022

Finding Time

February 20, 2022 /

Back during my January First Thoughts, I talked about finding those extra minutes during the day to write beyond my normal writing time. As with so many things, it got filed into the “must do” folder, and was buried.

Until this past week.

February, to date, hasn’t felt as productive as January, so from the middle of last week, I paid more attention to what I was doing, how I was doing it, and looking for fifteen minute blocks of time that could be put to better use by writing..

Across the four days, I tracked four separate blocks of time on each day, where I could step away from the television, or put aside busy-work. That’s an additional hour a day. Using my lower level of writing consumable words – 600 per hour, and assuming we have about 300 days left in the year, that’s an additional 180,000 words. Say three full length novels, or 45 short stories.

So there’s no excuse in trying to say I have no time to write!

Some Craft Thoughts

February 11, 2022 /

During the past couple of weeks I’ve been studying some aspects of the writing craft, especially openings. How you hook readers at the beginning of a story and keep them there until the end.

There are several types of opening, and they don’t all work in every type of fiction. Summary openings, for example, don’t work well in short stories, but are excellent openings for the right type of novel. Several people recommend not just study, but also typing the opening, as the physical action helps reinforce the technique and structure into your sub-conscious.

I was thinking about this as I read through some recent course notes, and started to cast around for stories to use as research. To my mind, there’s minimal benefit in studying writers at the same stage as me because none of us really know at this stage where we’re making mistakes. The writers to study are those who’ve been professional writers for many years.

People like Dean Koontz, Nora Roberts, and Michael Connolly to name just three.

I have a lot of their novels. In this case, I was looking for short fiction, and prowling through the bookshelves, kindle, and Apple books (or whatever the current name happens to be), when I realized I have a treasure trove.

In the past year I obtained two extensive short story collections: When Worlds Collide and Crimes Collide. Each collection is a hundred short stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. Two hundred stories by two of the top writers currently working today.

If I don’t learn something from those stories, I should probably hang up my keyboard!

Thoughts on January

February 3, 2022 /

I think my first thought yesterday was where did January go? It seems like five minutes ago we were celebrating the New Year, and now here we are in February.

On the writing front I finished six short stories, and submitted three. The others are destined for collections I’m working on. The seventh should have been finished on Monday, but a quick trip out for pizza ended up being much longer than planned for many reasons not relevant here.

January did end up being the most words I’ve written in the month since I began tracking my word count, so many positives there, and a good foundation for February.

As a follow up from my last post, Quiller Balalaika arrived today, and I immediately dived into the first chapter as soon as it was unwrapped.

I’m about 1,500 words from the end of that seventh story, so I’m off to finish it, with the reward of Quiller when I’m done. It could be a late night!

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