Jeff O'Handley

The Doubting Writer Finds His Voice

Monday Musing: And There It Is!

Good morning, all. Various bits and pieces of brain drivel from me: After pushing sixty degrees on Friday and Saturday, the temperature dropped, dropped, dropped. Drizzle on Saturday night turned into snow on Sunday morning, which hasn’t stopped yet. Plows are busy, and I will soon be busy as well, shoveling out the driveway (again). […]

Another NaNo Upon Us

Here we are, once again on the cusp of November, which means it’s time to ask two questions: -How the hell did October go by so fast? and-Are you doing NaNoWriMo? (On the odd chance someone is reading this who has no idea what NaNoWriMo is, follow the above link; or, here’s the nutshell: a […]

The NaNo Train is Rolling

And I’m not on it. Again. As it turns out, given the way my yearly writing calendar works (not that I really have one), I don’t always seem to have a draft to produce when November rolls around. This year, I fully expected to either be A) somewhere in the publication process for one of […]

Post-Game Presser

If you’re a sports fan, you’ve probably seen this. Your favorite team has just had its most convincing, most complete victory of the season. In this game/match/whatever you call it, they’ve done everything well. In winning, perhaps they’ve snuffed a multi-game losing streak. Or, maybe, it’s been a season of inconsistency, victories almost equally-balanced by […]

Stepping Back

After a rough week on the writing front, I managed to squeak out a few hundred words on Saturday followed by two good sessions Sunday which added about 3000 words to my current project. And, even better, I feel like those were 3000 pretty good words that add to my story. Yay. NaNo’s handy little […]

Untitled

I forgot to update my NaNo word count yesterday. It will always look to the whole world like I did nothing yesterday, that I’m a slacker, a NaNo pretender. t’s not entirely true–I actually wrote about 300 words yesterday that were intended for my project. I pretty much deliberately took yesterday off, though; after cranking […]

Weekend Update

Greetings, it’s the first blog post of November. After me kvetching over unseasonable weather back in early September, we had a gorgeous autumn, with a great run of fall colors and pleasant temperatures. And yesterday came and I woke up to snow. It wasn’t much–little patches here and there, more like ice pellets  that coated […]

NaNo Yes or NaNo No…or NaNo Sort of?

If you’ve been around this space any length of time, you’ll know I’ve documented my feelings and beliefs about NaNoWriMo before–and if I had bothered to stick one of those widgets with keyword terms in the sidebar (and if I had bothered to keyword all of my posts) you’d be able to find them all. […]

Some Numbers for Friday

This post was inspired by a recent thread on Absolute Write. It’s already sunk to page 2 or 3 of the forum threads, so I won’t link it here. Let’s throw out a few numbers, just for fun: 41       239       5.8335       307       8.7728       367      13.11 This ‘table’ shows the chapter count, total manuscript pages, and […]

Ah, December

This post is coming to you from the Department of the Top of My Head. IN the sports world, when a team is struggling through a rough patch, every win is treated as something of great significance. “This game is could mark a turning point in the season,”  the broadcasters and beatwriters say. “They really […]