Category Archives: Writing

Female Characters, Point of View, and Pete

Posted on June 14, 2009 by Pete

Pete attended a writer’s workshop this past weekend, wherein he learned that he’s great at plot, he’s a man of subtlety with male characters, but the female viewpoint continues to elude him. He also has point of view issues in several places because he wants to spoon-feed the reader too much information. Continue reading →

Posted in Cons, Struggles with the Craft, Writing | 13 Comments

Buried in Revisions

Posted on June 6, 2009 by Pete

I’m currently buried in grammar, plot, and character while I try to finish the second re-write of Alchemist. I’ve been, in the words of good friend Taylor Anderson, “writing my fool tail off” in an effort to prepare for an impromptu writing workshop that I’ll be attending next weekend. I intend to begin submissions again shortly after Continue reading →

Posted in Struggles with the Craft, Writing | 1 Comment

Some thoughts on rejection

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Pete

It sucks.

No, really.

“Entropy of Memory” was just rejected today by Clarkesworld Magazine. (This is a great publication very much deserving its Hugo nomination this year. They reportedly publish only twelve stories from slush each year, and they get hundreds of submissions. I would have been honored to be included in their magazine, but I fully understand the demands of the market, the state of the genre, and my own previously unpublished nature.) This makes a total of seventy-three (73) rejections for me over the past several years. Some of them are shorts submitted to various markets, most of them are query letters to agents, and a couple of them are attempts at getting one of my novels out of the slush pile. Continue reading →

Posted in Struggles with the Craft, Writing | 5 Comments

A Christmas Story by Peter Hodges

Posted on December 23, 2008 by Pete

I posted this last year, but judging from traffic reports, I have a lot of new readers who likely haven’t seen this story.  I tried to envision what it would have been like to be a shepherd on a night just … Continue reading →

Posted in Writing | 2 Comments

It begins anew…

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Pete

And the auspicious first line for my new, super-secret project: Zealotry never really goes out of style. Speculate away.

Posted in Writing | 5 Comments

It's really a question of vengeance, wouldn't you say?

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Pete

At what point do a soldier’s actions in a war cross the line from legal prosecution of their duties into vengeance? Ask Jonah Rosenthal, captain of the Thomas Smith. Download here. I found the comments from last week’s post to … Continue reading →

Posted in Writing | 5 Comments

The Vampire Suicide

Posted on October 4, 2008 by Pete

Remember the Vampire piece that I wrote just to show that I could? This formed the backbone of an assignment I was given at Viable Paradise–i.e. write a dark fantasy short story as close to five thousand words as possible. … Continue reading →

Posted in Writing | 8 Comments

An exercise in sensory perception

Posted on October 3, 2008 by Pete

Viable Paradise, writing assignment one: Sensory Perception exercise. In this exercise, we were instructed to provide descriptions of as many senses as possible without losing narrative focus. I chose to use a fictional carnal encounter between a spring nymph and … Continue reading →

Posted in Writing | 3 Comments

The Last Day

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Pete

Peaceful resistance failed. Conventional weaponry was ineffective. Nuclear weapons couldn’t even hold them back. They came from the sea…on the California side, actually. Everyone appreciated the irony of California getting eaten by some sort of quasi-intelligent sea-borne army. One commentator even remarked … Continue reading →

Posted in Writing | 8 Comments

Alchemist Sneak Peek

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Pete

The following is a half chapter from my latest project, Alchemist. In it, a young man thought to be the lost scion of a royal family leads a rag-tag army against those who would deny him his ancestral rights.

Posted in Writing | 1 Comment