A ‘no system’ writing system
Perhaps the dirtiest secret of my writing process is that I completely lack a ‘system.’ No strict word count per day. No specific writing times. Minimal outlining. No spreadsheets of…
Discovering a genre while (accidentally) writing in it
When friends and family ask me about the plot of my debut novel, The Side Questers, I sometimes find myself getting cagey with the details. Not because I’m embarrassed by…
Can Fans Save Us From AI Media?
It’s September 2014, and I’m sitting in Bioinformatics 527, learning about machine learning models and how to apply them to genomics data. The instructor describes how these models “learn” (read:…
Scientific vs. Fiction Publishing — The Same?
I mean this quite sincerely: Thank you, academia, for (mostly) preparing me for the agonizing pace of traditional publishing. In science, ideas can develop quickly, but their execution is slow.…
Learning to “love” feedback
Writing a novel is a deeply personal activity. It’s a translation of one’s own imagination into physical words, ostensibly for sharing with others, but also as a permanent record of…
Writing Science…Fiction
At the ripe old age of three, I wrote ‘The Man Who Lost His Hat,’ a deep tale of stick-figure regret and personal anguish (yes, I still have the “manuscript”),…
Revisiting my first query attempt (circa 2019)
Querying a novel is a difficult thing to do. Indeed, I would argue it’s even more difficult to “get right” than actually, you know, writing the book. I’m sure there…
A first post about a first (failed) book
In the fall of 2011, I was a senior in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Michigan, and despite a full load of coursework and an…
J.J. Kochmanski 