I’ve spent the past couple of days wrestling with which viewpoint I want to use in my novel. The two most common viewpoint perspectives are first and third person, with omniscient after that (and second person completely out of the question).

As a child of the 80s, I got to witness the beginning and evolution of “instant” gratification. For example, I remember when we got our first VCR. No longer did my sister and I have to wait around for our favorite television programs to come on. All we had to do was insert a video tape and, assuming we had remembered to rewind it after the previous viewing, press play and watch our favorite shows any time we wanted! I also recall our first microwave. It was big and metal and had huge dials on the front to control the… (read more)

When I wrote Commodork (my first self-published book), I had no idea what I was doing. And although I hadn’t had a lick of training, I did have a pretty good sense of story. Before I started writing I made a list of all the stories I wanted to tell in the book. Then I wrote the titles of all those stories out on index cards, sorted them into piles, and put the piles in an order that made sense to me. The piles ultimately became my chapters. Of course, my cards didn’t contain every single detail — in fact,… (read more)

I hate work assignments that involve tons of complications and political tangles and workplace drama. The writing assignment for our class is the exact opposite of all those things, and exactly the kind of assignment I like. “You owe me 25,000 words this March, and 50,000 words this May. Good luck.” In the real world, nobody checks to make sure you’ve been keeping up with your word counts and writing a little bit every day. If nothing else over the past several months, I’ve learned graduate school is no joke.

Hello, my name is Rob. I work on computers all day, and write all night. Someday, I hope to swap those things around. Chances are pretty good that if you’ve found (and are reading) this blog, you already know who I am. If not, here’s all you need to know: I am a 42-year-old man child. I’m married, have two children (one teen, one tween), and live in Oklahoma. I like old video games, old arcade games and old computers. I enjoy podcasting, but even more than that, I enjoy writing. If you want to know more about me than… (read more)

I returned to school this week for another round of graduate classes. I’ve doubled my workload this semester. Last semester I only took one class, and this semester, I’m taking two. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I’m taking Writing the Novel. The class is being taught by Professor Chester, the same woman who taught my Writing the Short Story class last semester. There are nine students in the class, seven of which were in my short story class from last semester, so I feel pretty comfortable in there. In short story class we wrote three 5,000 word (maximum) short stories.… (read more)

I received A’s for all four stories I turned in for my short story writing class, with encouragement from my professor to submit them for publication. Over the past few months, I’ve been doing just that. My experience, to date: The first step involves finding the right publication for your story. You might think that’s as simple as searching Google for magazines that publish short stories and submitting your story to them, but I found there’s more to it than that. First of all, you’ve got to find magazines that publish stories in the same genre as what you’ve written.… (read more)

This week marks the end of my first semester as a grad student at OU… except I wasn’t really a grad student, and the class I took won’t count toward my degree. Where to begin? The ball started rolling this past summer when Susan asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was a trick question as I don’t really plan on growing up, but if I had to, I suppose the answer is, “a writer.” This sparked a conversation that ultimately led us to discover the “Master of Professional Writing” graduate degree program. The program… (read more)

For me, the hardest thing about learning how to type properly was unlearning how I used to type. I began typing in 1980 when we got our first computer. My original technique involved poking at keys one at a time starting with only a single finger, and quickly graduated to two and then four before eventually unleashing all of my digits on the machine’s expensive keyboard. It wasn’t until I took a computer class my senior year that I heard that phrase so common in today’s online society: despite being able to deliver 90-100 words per minute, I was told… (read more)