Signature

 Sketching     I'd like to deviate from writing for a post to talk about my other creative media. I love to sketch and eventually intend to post concept art for my story.       As a kid I was given the book "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" by Stan Lee and John Buscema. It's quite dated but the lessons still hold up. Comic artists now days are exceptionally good at figure drawing and something I aspire to. It's fun and I have always valued creative freedom above all else. I love to draw my own characters and creatures and rarely turn to fan art.        Drawing, like all art, is of course better with models to work from and I do my share of life sketches as well as photoshop dreamscapes. Many of the environments in my story were inspired by my art. They will be worked into future posts.      I consider myself a good artist but could be exceedingly better by focusing on it more. Sadly that has fallen by the wayside to my writing. Although it is something to be pur

 Science and Science Fiction     As a science fiction writer I'm constantly in a balancing act of making my book as scientifically accurate as possible but also making it fast paced and entertaining. On one hand you want the story to sound plausible for the future and on the other there are so many, many reasons why sci-fi concepts wouldn't work or wouldn't work with any rational degree of efficiency.      I do a lot of research for my book. Terraforming Mars is a big part of it; in my story humans fast track the lengthy process of terraforming, which would take thousands of years, by harvesting the atmosphere from another life supporting planet. The obvious catch with this is transporting the massive amount of resources across megaparsecs dividing Mars and the theoretical planet would be even less efficient. So I took some artistic licenses and came up with currents in space which work with the curvature of spacetime. If I can come up with yet undiscovered alien concepts I

 Editing      I've done the hard part, crawled through the first draft with my hands and knees in the mud but now it's finally time to make it shine. Fleshing out those bones you laid is the fun part. First drafts are honestly kind of cringe worthy.       Thank goodness for spell check; I'm a terrible speller. You should see all the red lines lacing any given document of mine. What's weird is often times my attempted words won't be close enough for spell check to register but if I copy them into my search engine, it finds what I meant.       Dictionary.com is my other best friend. I'm always looking up definitions and synonyms. It's right there on my bookmark toolbar. If I don't know a word I'll look it up and bookmark it so I don't forget.     The main blemishes (thank you dictionary.com) I need to weed out of my manuscript are echoed words. I can repeat the same word three times in a sentence and not notice. It happened today. There are close r

 Writing Habits Writing is a passion of mine. I love to create my own characters and worlds. But even I have a resistance to doing it. Writing is a daunting task; it's hard to be creative. You're putting out something entirely new. How can you hope to do it consistently?  Really, you have to find what works for you. I tend to be tired and have anxiety at night so I focus on working in the morning. I like to ease myself into it by saying "I'll watch one more youtube video then write". It's like jumping into a cold swimming pool; some people will dive in head first while others gradually sink in. The important thing is it happens. I try to write a page a day, everyday or in the case of editing, work on several pages. Routines help me a lot. You want to make it as easy as possible with an outline to guide you. A proper time and environment are also key. I tend to have wrist trouble so I bought an ergonomic keyboard. Distractions like the phone and cat are arch ne

 Introduction (Why I'm Here)     Hi, I'm Matthew. I've written a sci-fi book "Rainbows Wane", the first in my "Signature" series. It's coming along great. I have the bones laid and am in the process of fleshing out and publishing it. There's much work to be done.       You've probably heard horror stories about trying to get published like how "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole wasn't published until eleven years after his suicide in a tragic tale. Writing is filled with uncertainty and putting your heart, your work for thousands of hours, on the line. Even if you get published you're far from guaranteed to make money. But fret not, due to the age of information, times are changing. Self publishing and selling on platforms like Kindle and Amazon are viable options. There are many ways to promote your book and yourself as a writer. Such are in my process of exploration.      I am taking an advanced approach to en