Posts by Blake Smith

Maintenance

I took my car in for an oil change yesterday, and it took about five times longer than it should have. If I wasn’t trying to cut down on the amount of stuff I own, I would have given it up as a bad job, bought a set of ramps, and changed the oil myself.

Alas, I took another reluctant step toward stereotypical suburban wine-mom-hood (the very idea sends shivers down my spine; I’m fighting it, but that’s a whole ‘nother story), and paid someone to poke under my car while I sat in their office. On the plus side, waiting for almost two hours gave me time to think about maintenance and whether the concept applies to writing. Read more

Back up Your Data!

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Everybody knows that you hit ‘save’ before you walk away from the computer. Read more

Cross-Pollination

As you may have guessed from the title, I’ve been doing a lot of work in my- unfortunately small- garden over the summer, and I have plants on the brain. Weirdly, I’ve made no progress on the gardening-related regency romance that I started last winter. But that’s not what this post is about. Read more

I Cannot Word

Happens every time. I get two-thirds of the way through a book, and I start to hate the sight of the characters. Even the interesting ones. This puts up a mental block in my brain, and I start to go into a tailspin of, “I’m terrible at this! Why did I ever think I could write a book? Nobody likes me; everybody hates me; guess I’ll eat some worms.” Read more

Deleted Scenes and Director’s Cuts

Remember my scheme to make millions of dollars by offering my books for sale on Amazon Prime Day? Alas, it didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped.

The most likely reason is that my both new content and my sales were centered around a series that isn’t terribly popular. Not because it’s awful, but it was some of my first published work, which shows; and it doesn’t fit well into a particular genre (it’s meant to be historical fantasy, but isn’t quite fantastical enough).

Before you say, “What’d you go and do a fool thing like that for?” allow me to say that I was recovering from the plague (not literally, but sometimes it felt like that) and I had to work with what I had. I had one other short that might have worked, but it’s a standalone and I wrote it when I had no idea how to structure short stories. So I’m saving that one for later, possibly after it’s been through a couple rounds of editing.

But I’ve been thinking. Read more