Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 1 of 14)

Farewell to March

March 31, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This has been a very mixed month. From a day-job and business perspective it’s been a great month. I had a client go-live and apart from some initial hiccups it’s been a very smooth experience. So smooth that as we move into April we are already starting to plan how to increase the volume.

On the writing and publishing front, it hasn’t been so productive – possibly because the work events not only took up time, but also because they required a huge amount of mental effort. By the end of each day when I typically do a big piece of my daily writing I’ve been too mentally exhausted to focus on the story, or what the characters want to do next. The result is that as of the middle of today, I’m still five hundred words behind where I was in February, and a long long way from my targeted word count for the month.

The one benefit is that I’ve managed to work out some story blocks in my head so when April begins I can do a reset and move forward. I also wrote a short story for a magazine that hadn’t been in my plan. It’s a themed magazine and the March theme just happened to resonate enough that before I knew it, I’d written a thousand words to start it off. Then it stalled a little before a burst in the past few days which let me meet the submission deadline.

At one point in the past week, I was leaning toward saying good riddance to March. Now I’m a little more relaxed and I’m okay to say farewell to March.

Bracketology

March 24, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m not usually a follower of March Madness until the Final Four, and only then if it involves a team I’m interested in.

This year is different as I joined two March Madness pools. One for the men, and one for the women. While I haven’t watched every game, I’ve certainly kept myself aware of the results. If you’ve done these pools before, I’m sure you’re familiar with going through the match-offs and predicting the winners of each game all the way through to the championship final, and predicting the eventual winner.

My knowledge of basketball is, at best, limited. When I first moved to the US and lived in southern Connecticut it was about the time Geno Auriemma and the UConn women were beginning their dominance. The UConn – Tennessee rivalry was always in the news. For the men, Duke, maybe Duke, and quite probably Duke. I’m sure there were other teams in the mix, like UConn in 2004 when both the men’s and women’s teams were National Champions – a feat they repeated in 2014 if Wikipedia is to be believed.

The surprise this year, to me anyway, has been the preponderance of SEC teams as top seeds. I always consider the SEC as a football conference, yet here we have Alabama, Auburn, Florida, and Tennessee in the top six NCAA rankings, with another ten SEC teams in the final 64.

As I live in SEC country, they took the edge in the matchups although I didn’t have the courage to pick against Duke until the Elite Eight when the play Alabama. We’ll see just how good I am on April 6 and 7 where I have UConn to win the Women’s Championship game and Auburn to win the men’s.

Unexpected Treasures

March 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This past weekend I was completing a back up to my portable hard drive when I noticed a folder with the name Compiled Drafts. The name didn’t ring any bells in my memory but I surmised it was the destination folder for when I compiled stories from Scrivener. That made the folder several years old as I changed my whole approach to manuscript generation and storage about three or four years ago.

When I looked at the contents of the folder it was like unwrapping a special present at Christmas.

There were thirty-four files in the folder. Some of the filenames I recognized as stories I’d written. Looking at them, most were partially completed – probably a version I printed out to work out where next to take the story.

Other file names were strange.

For example, the document A Higher Order didn’t even sound familiar. When I checked my stories master list spreadsheet, it wasn’t on there either.

So I opened the document and started reading. The story is about a librarian. And I have no recollection of writing it, although I must have done because my name is on the title page and in the metadata as the owner of the document. There were another six or seven stories like that and I’ve moved them all into my master list and story folder structure.

When I wrote in January about the number of unpublished short stories I had, these few weren’t even on my radar. Now I have more to consider and work with.

That’s the sort of problem I like!

A New Name for an Old Concept

March 11, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time, but always seemed to get distracted with other topics until now.

Several years ago when I was first coming to grips with the note taking application Obsidian, which I’ve written about previously, I came across the term transclusion in the documentation. That had me scratching my head until I read further and discovered it’s a way to reference another document from the current document, and have the contents of the referenced document displayed.

A light bulb went off in my head and took me back several decades to my programming days. It’s the same as the COBOL INCLUDE statement.

A colleague once remarked that every industry renames concepts on a semi-regular basis. He’d built a good career around training and consulting on the impact of those name changes. Files, records, and fields becoming tables, rows , and columns – that sort of thing.

While I was checking some things for this post, I learned the Obsidian help now talks about how to embed a file. Transclusion isn’t mentioned, which I think makes it easier for the non-technical user.

Still, it’s interesting to see that sometimes, even the new names get replaced.

Reflections on Learning

March 3, 2025 /

Over the past few weeks I’ve been taking a study course on a very specific area of the writing craft. It’s called the rule of three.

Essentially whenever you describe something in a story, the most effective way is to describe it in a block of three. To use an example from a piece of my recent writing – Judy smelled the smoke now. The bitter tang of burnt wool, seared yarns, and charred wood.

There are some rules around this as well. You shouldn’t chain two sets of three immediately after each other. That becomes a list and readers mostly skip lists. Well, not totally. Research shows you read the first, second, and last items on the list and your eyes just skip past everything in between. Pretty much all the top writers use rule of three in some way, shape, or form.

I was thinking about that as I read through the stories that make up my latest science fiction story collection – Where Infinity Begins. There are six stories in the collection, some of them written four or five years ago before I learned about rule of three. And it shows.

Usually my final read through of the stories in a collection is to check for spelling and character consistency; height, eye color, hair color, that sort of thing. I try to avoid detailed editing for two reasons. Firstly editing like this is my critical voice at work, and secondly, I’d rather be writing new stories than rehashing something I wrote a year or more ago. This time though, probably because of the class, I was very aware of rule of three and where I hadn’t used it, especially in the older stories. So in this editing session I did do more than just correct spelling.

In places I added that third element of description and I think the stories are better for it. That’s only my opinion though. Grab a copy of Where Infinity Begins and let me know what you think.

A Quick Update

February 17, 2025 /

Just a few sentences this week as I have a lot happening that I’ll share more about over the next few weeks.

The paperback author copies of Ceres to Vesta arrived yesterday and I saw I’d misaligned the title a little. I’m surprised Amazon didn’t flag it as a potential issue, but ultimately the responsibility is mine, so back to InDesign and fix it. That’s one of the great things about publishing independently, I can fix problems like this in a day or so.

And talking of InDesign is a good reminder that a couple of weeks ago I mentioned how I was struggling with the layout for a paperback cover. A little bit of time, and some judicious use of search engines and I came up with the answer. You start with a three page spread at 8.5″ x 5.5″ page size, then use the Page Tool to resize that second page until it matches the spine width you want.

I’ll try it in the next week or so with the next short story collection – Where Infinity Begins – and let you know how it works out.

A Punch in the Mouth

February 10, 2025 /

I was going to write this week’s blog on a separate subject, then changed my mind after watching the Super Bowl last night which reminded me of Mike Tyson’s comment which is the title of this blog.

Firstly, congratulations to the Philadelphia Eagles on an emphatic victory.

I had mixed feelings about even watching the game. The teams I follow or have an affinity for, either didn’t make the playoffs, or were eliminated early on. That said, there was a part of me that leaned slightly toward the Kansas City Chiefs, mainly because whatever Patrick Mahomes has done is constantly compared to the achievements of Tom Brady. Three Super Bowl wins in three years would definitely set Mahomes apart from Brady, and the Chiefs from those other teams with extensive winning records – Lombardi’s Packers, the 70’s Steelers, the 90’s Cowboys, and the Patriots.

The first sets of plays in the first quarter brought to mind Mike Tyson’s comment. Tyson’s comment came in response to a question about his opponent having a plan. Tyson replied. “Everyone has a plan until I punch them in the mouth.”

That was how I felt about the Chiefs. The Chiefs had a plan for the game. The plan worked until the Eagles punched them in the mouth. And then the Eagles kept doing it.

While I doubt any of us writing or reading this blog have been, or will be, appearing in a Super Bowl, we all suffer setbacks during our lives. Some are minor. Others more serious, akin to Tyson’s punch in the mouth, set us back on our heels, or put us on the floor. I believe it’s how we react to these situations that define who we are. If you can pick yourself up, dust yourself up, make another plan, and move forward again then you improve the chances of getting what you’re striving for.

I’m sure there will be some long and hard conversations in Kansas City over the next few months, but don’t be surprised if they’re back in the Super Bowl next year in San Francisco.

First Deliveries

February 3, 2025 /

The first of the short story collections I mentioned last week is now available on the top retailers. The book is titled Ceres to Vesta and contains five stories about the asteroid belt.

I came close to missing this weekend because I changed my cover design tool mid-week. For the past few years I’ve been using Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher for my covers. When I was designing the cover for Ceres to Vesta I wanted a sans serif science fiction like font. The Affinity products didn’t have a font that looked right, so I did some searches and found what I was looking for. The font family wasn’t free and I was okay with that until I saw the price of a commercial license, and the fairly low usage count that went with it.

Before I clicked the buy button on the font family, I recalled a comment someone made a year or so ago that you get a commercial license for all the fonts available for Adobe InDesign. So I flipped open a new browser tab and did some research on the Adobe site. The annual license for InDesign was only slightly more than the license for the font family and also gives me access to the thirty-thousand fonts in Adobe Fonts, so it ended up being an easy decision.

I then spent nearly two days working out how to do some basic tasks in InDesign that generally took ten minutes in Affinity. After some heavy use of the Google search engine, I had the color, layout, and spacing the way I wanted.

The eBook covers were easy. The paperback cover not so much. InDesign doesn’t like the Amazon cover templates – or if it does I haven’t worked it out yet. I’m on the ground floor of knowledge when it comes to InDesign, but I’m glad I made the switch, and if I reach my publishing goals for 2025 then by definition my InDesign skills will improve.

More on 2025

January 27, 2025 /

In many ways this post is a follow on from last week which helped me put some concrete ideas around 2025 writing goals.

When I first considered my 2025 goals one of the thoughts was to publish a novella each month of the year. The challenge with that is a novella can often stretch into a full length novel. I know I want to write at least one novel this year so that made me rethink and lower my sights a little.

After a lot of thought, I decided a target of eight publications in 2025 was reasonable and they would be a combination of novels and novellas.

Last weeks discovery of those languishing short stories rather upended those thoughts. If I have enough material for four collections, or even eight, I could reach my 2025 publishing goals without writing a word.

Not exactly what I had in mind.

So after a lot of thought, I went back to the twelve publications for 2025. That’s the original eight novels or novellas plus the four collections. I also plan to run a kickstarter on one of those novels. For the collections, I have covers, sales copy, and introductions for the first two, plus content for the third. I am still planning on the collections coming out quarterly.

The goal is to finish the setup, editing, and production of the first collection this week and have the eBooks available by the end of January.

Another Big Number

January 19, 2025 /

The number I have in my head today isn’t as large as the 7,500 I talked about last week, but in its own way it’s pretty big.

Part of a writing assignment this past week was to look at the catalog or inventory of stories I’ve written, and determine how many are published, how many out for submission, and how many are sitting gathering dust on a hard drive. For my novels and novellas it was a pretty easy task – everything written is published. The short stories were a different matter.

Once I stripped out everything that’s with various magazines for consideration, and those stories already in collections, I had over sixty short stories that are languishing doing nothing. I had been vaguely aware there were quite a few, and in some cases, like Puzzle Store stories, I knew I needed another one or two to have enough for the next collection. That still left a substantial number, so I went through each story one by one. Some of those stories still defy a genre, while others fit together more naturally together – either by character or location, or theme, or just by being flat out weird.

The end result is that just from this, I have enough material for four collections. Interestingly enough, three of them are science fiction collections. I’m leaning toward publishing a collection a quarter for the rest of 2025, but that may change as I look at the remaining forty or so stories.

I’m excited about these collections and will be working on covers, introductions, and edits this coming week.

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