My catalog: A 🧵. I've written a lot of books. I'm not prolific, just old. Crank out a book or two every year or two and eventually you have a wall of books. I mainly use X to talk about writing and books, so I thought I'd use this thread to explain all the crazy stuff I write:

The common advice is to what you know, but there's a lot to be said for writing someone different from you on multiple levels and doing your honest best to understand the world through their eyes.

I think authors are often at their best when writing the interior lives of the opposite sex. It requires a little extra attention to detail to make it seamless.

Technology has been at war with prose ever since the invention of the camera and the phonograph. Two hundred years ago we had rich vocabularies for colors, textures, shapes, and sounds, because we needed to describe what we saw using vivid language to bring the written word to life. We possessed words for every possible form of architecture, clothing, food, flora, fauna, and words for body parts that today are used only as trivia. But every passing year we shed precise words for general ones. We may one day have vast masses of people who barely use any language at all.

Another three thousand words today. 10k in two days feels like this book might actually get written after all.

Wound up with insomnia, so dragged myself out of bed at two to bang out the next scene. Didn't get to bed until 4:30. If I count words in a 24 hour period, 7174. The bonus words were good. Emotionally solid scene without too much weirdness, just two characters changing as they learn to trust each other.

Fell short. 5750. I could type out another 250 words, but I'm running on fumes and already feel like the last thousand words I typed are going to wind up deleted. Still, good stuff today. A penis museum. A naked man screaming about Darwin. A popsicle vampire. A sheriff scrubbing blood out of the back seat of his cruiser. Truck stop coffee at four in the morning. A silver trailer next to a sea of marsh grass, glowing in the dawn. Fart scented sludge from a tap that hasn't been run in months. A dead uncle's homemade porn collection on betamax. My timeline for the plot is still a jumbled mess, but I feel like any given page you land upon has something to hold your attention.

Goal for today is 6k words of first draft for Too Much and Barely Enough.

Am I going crazy or is my KDP sales graph flipping me the bird?

I was raised in a fundamentalist, evangelical household and the rather obvious conflicts between the core beliefs and material reality paved my journey into atheism. Still, it's absurd to claim that members of this particular flavor of faith are more selfish or self-centered than average. There's a tremendous amount of community building and charity that exists in nearly all churches. When my family hit hard times, other members of the church were there to bring us groceries. If a family member is hospitalized, an extremely high percentage of the church is likely to visit you, or at the very least pick up a phone and call your family to check in on how they are doing. If you are an outsider to the faith, I honestly don't see why anyone should waste time sitting around judging the various strains of Christianity against someone imaginary scale of legitimacy. If I took away one important teaching from my fundamentalist childhood its the idea that I don't need to worry about the splinter in another man's eye while I'm walking around with an entire log in mine. Instead of spending your ever dwindling days searching out the flaws in what other people believe you will benefit more by a continuous self audit of your own blind spots and hypocrisies. We are all flawed. When confronted by the flaws of others, do we treat them with scorn or with grace?

Saying goodbye to the beach. Turn right at the eldritch horror then onward to home.

If James Gunn wants the next Wonder Woman movie to make a billion dollars he needs to lean into the fact that Wonder Woman canonically uses a kangaroo for space travel. Also, her most trusted companion is a Nazi scientist bad girl who turned good after being, um, disciplined by the Amazons.

"The key thing is rationality is not the same as intelligence." This is a good insight. My experience has been that people who are good at rational thinking often wind up believing jaw-dropping absurdities. They are highly skilled at building up an impenetrable wall of logic supporting their beliefs, teetering upon a foundation of ambiguous or non-existent evidence. I'm count myself among the great mass of intelligent people who believe seven stupid things before breakfast, but do think that writing novels has rescued me from any number of mental traps. Since I constantly live inside the minds of people whose ideas contradict my own and try to flesh them out into characters with a coherent world view, it gives me empathy for how people can arrive at utterly incorrect understanding of fairly simple things, and helps me understand my own laughably flawed grasp of what is true and what is false within our shared reality.