Here’s a lovely review of The Pono Way for the SFSPBC.
In other news, I’m writing my dad’s obituary. That’s what I’m working on.
Tag: #amwriting
Inching Closer
Still a couple fiddly layout bits to fix with my manuscript, and then it will be ready to publish! I’m so stoked! Publishing THE PONO WAY was the one thing I actually wanted to accomplish this year.
This picture is much what I imagine my island-state, Pono, to look like, although this is a coastal city and my Pono is in the deep ocean. This is an architectural concept of a floating city called Oceanix. It’s synchronistic how it popped up in the news as I was drafting my novel.
Tomorrow I will share the cover reveal! Meanwhile, here is the blurb for Amazon. What do you think?
A refugee crisis tests a utopian island community to its limits.
In 2050, the United States of America finally crumbled. Jake Weintraub’s family fled the burned-out ruins of Chicago for the safety of the artificial island steading of Pono. Now grown, Jake works as an independent journalist, but the horrors of the Chicago River Riots still haunt him.
As Pono watches, safe in the Pacific Ocean, the successor West Coast state of Cascadia collapses under a further series of catastrophes. Thousands of desperate refugees arrive on Pono’s shores – homeless, stateless, and hungry.
Jake throws himself into covering their story, even as their plight evokes memories of his own trauma and flight. Can Pono, a carefully constructed island society, accept this influx of strangers? Or will this crisis tear Ponoan society apart?
THE PONO WAY is a solarpunk science fiction novel in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s THREE CALIFORNIAS or THE FIFTH SACRED THING by Starhawk. Find out what happens by buying your copy today!
500 Words
Following the publication of my novel, Daughter of Atlas, I’ve started working on a new project. It is a solarpunk novella for a shared world anthology, with a couple friends. I have been working on it pretty consistently, and I feel pretty good about it.
I write 500 words a day.
I’ve always struggled with writing consistently. Indeed, I stopped writing at all for almost ten years. I was feeling too burned out and beaten down. So I know I won’t ever be able to make a paying career out of this, but that’s okay. I’ve started again, that’s the thing.
But even in my not-writingest periods, I’ve always known that you need to write every day to make a go of it. And not just dicking around in your journal, either. You need to write something that you hope or intend for people to read, every day, to produce work and to improve.
It is only now that I have come to do that. Write every day. I want to now, like I didn’t want to before. (The book The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield helped me understand my not-wanting, and confront it. I recommend it.) And the amount that I’m writing is 500 words.
So far, it’s working for me, because it’s such a small amount. One page. It is extremely hard to talk myself out of writing it. It would be embarrassing. 500 words. Come on, man. Embarrassing to not write it. One page. Hard to rationalize blowing off a single page. That’s the key, so far. That’s what’s working for me.
To be honest, I don’t write every day. I write in the evenings, because I’m just not a morning person. And I close at work one day a week, so I don’t get home until late. I usually don’t write then. And my writer’s workshop is on Thursdays, and then I don’t get home until almost ten. No writing then.
But I write most nights. And every night that I do, I have 500 words more than I did the night before. It’s good enough. Far better than all the many nights when I had no words. 300 nights of 500 words makes a novel. How do you eat an elephant? One 500-word bite at a time.
Atlantis Fallen 