Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips How do you do something everyday for ten years? You do it everyday (for ten years). Every morning, with very few exceptions, I sit and view the news on the Internet. I make notes in a weblog. See here and here. Recently, I noted that I had done this for ten years. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Someone who had a big influence on my life has passed away. “The Mote in God’s Eye.” Star Wars was in theaters, and everyone was enthralled. The science fiction community tried to fit in with Luke, Han, and the rest, often in vain. Every science fiction commentator had their own list of, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Can’t think of anything to write about? Back to freshman English. It was one of the first classes I took in college. I took it the summer after high school graduation. It was a writing class, I guess it was called English Composition or something. We had a great teacher for this […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The basic steps I have used to writing a professional, non-fiction book and having it published. I have written about half-a-dozen professional non-fiction books. The counting is a bit fuzzy when you include a second edition or two here and there. These were published by the IEEE and other publishers of such […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some of the best-written pieces were done “on the spur of the moment” at a writing event. That includes week-long events and one-hour events. The summary above is true in my experience. I have read pieces written in five-minute exercises, “Okay, everyone write. I will ring the bell in five minutes or […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Yet another group of needless words and the search for the actual verb. I recently read something and felt my skin crawl at the same time. Something was amiss. Sigh, go back, read it again. We are requesting that you give blah blah blah. Okay, what’s wrong? This is another version of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Writers (and everyone else): use the research resources that are available. And extend them. Mark this one under the non-existent tag of #a-writing-basic-that-I-feel-compelled-to-write-about-just-for-the-record or something like that. Writers: Google stuff before you write. Google stuff while you are writing. Google stuff after you have finished writing. This is not a paid commercial […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Somteimes I miss the analog days. They covered a lot of my mistakes. Handwritten notes let me fudge and smudge and avoid mistakes—like spelling. I could smudge the “i” and the “e” together and put the dot of the “i” somewhere in the middle, and no one could tell that I didn’t […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I write all the time. I am not afraid to write. One reason is that no one ever told me that I should be afraid to write. Please don’t ever tell anyone they should be afraid. I write. I write everyday. This is the third or fourth piece of writing I am […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A new edition of the cheapest computer in the store finds a small tablet and keyboard for $80. Slow, but sufficient. Want to write a book? Can’t afford a MacBook Pro or Surface Pro or someone-else’s-pro? Here is a writing system for $80. It comprises an Amazon Fire 7″ $50 tablet and […]

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