This past January I was at a convention and sat on a panel with Sandra Tayler. Along the way she used a phrase that has stayed with me. She had been talking about her daughter, and about times when she was “fighting with her art.” That’s what I’m doing right now. My production plan says […]
Read More ...Author Archive: Ron Collins
Merry Clayton, the art of a background singer?
Earlier this week I was listening to Radio Paradise when the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” came on. I’ve been a big Stones fan for a very long time, and “Gimme Shelter” is among my faves. One of the many things I like about Radio Paradise (beyond that it’s manually programmed and managed by two people who […]
Read More ...Zelazny: The Dream Master
I recently finished reading Roger Zelazny’s The Dream Master, a 1965 Nebula award winner that I found tucked into a corner of Robert’s Bookstore in Lincoln City, Oregon. I haven’t read a ton of Zelazny in my life as a SF-follower, but I’ve been thinking a lot about him after a panel that I attended […]
Read More ...Playing with First Line Poetry
Earlier this week I was listening to a podcast about Pulitzer Award winning author Toni Morrison. One of the speakers in the discussion had concocted a poem from the first lines of her novels. It was a fascinating thing, and it got me to wondering about my own work. So this morning, I sat down […]
Read More ...A road-map to writing avoidance
1. Wake up a little late, and don’t get to anything productive until something past 8:30. This is actually a great way to not write. 2. Start by focusing on something actually important that is not focused on creating words. Like tax preparation. This is what I did today, and it quite easily ate up […]
Read More ...The Business Plan
I spent a lot of the “downtime” we had in Oregon talking to other full time writers about scheduling their days and about developing business plans. This was quite useful. Yesterday, I actually took time to put their lessons into practice, and now—for the first time ever—I have the outlines and makings of a full-out […]
Read More ...Sharing a TOC with That Guy from Dune
Since Kevin Anderson just noted it on his own site, I suppose it’s fair game for me to mention another cool thing about the Pulse Pounders anthology that will be the home for my short story “Fraternization.” Yes, this is the one that will also have Brigid’s story “Frostburnt,” which already makes it the worlds’ […]
Read More ...Kroger ads – It’s a non-male world :)
If you follow me at all you know that I became a kept man about three months ago. By this, of course, I mean that Lisa makes the steady paycheck and I am working in this weird and unpredictable world of the freelance/on-spec writer. This also means that I do a vast majority of the […]
Read More ...Doonesbury – But the Pension Fund Was Just Sitting There
When we were in Oregon, we stopped at a place called Robert’s Books. It’s one of those used book stores from the heavens that get plopped down right at the corner of nowhere and Main Street and just reeks of the Fabulous. I came a way with a pair of books–Roger Zelazny’s The Dream Master, […]
Read More ...Getting my act together
The Oregon Coast workshop kind of kicked my butt. Buy that, I mean it was more work than I had planned for, and as such it’s taken me a little mind-shifting to get myself back on my path. One major thing I took away from it was that as a new freelancer, I needed to […]
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