Randall G. Arnold's Blog

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This is a subject I should have addressed years ago, when I first got into public speaking, and I owe a very special individual for prompting me about it in a late night text chat.

I am dyslexic.

Everyone who knows I write professionally has expressed surprise at that revelation.  Because they see the printed page, the final unblemished product, not the often-agonizing process.

I feel this is worth discussing and truly wish I’d thought to reveal my struggle on my own.  I’ve had so many opport...

I’m not happy with the WordPress theme here.  It loads too slowly, the text is too light (with no override setting!), it’s too expansive, etc etc etc.  I also need to get busy on better graphics but that’s a whole ‘nother thing.

Anyway, I’m searching for a better site theme.  I’ve tried several but have yet to find one that works well for an author.

Any suggestions?

You’ll notice I added a contact form to make it easier for you to spam me.  So fire away…

As many already know, my first professionally-published fiction story was 2015’s The Dolphin Riders (you can find the background here), inspired by a mockumentary.  However, it’s neither the first “future flooded Earth” story I wrote nor the first in what’s become a sequence of stories.  So, I thought I’d give you all a peek into what’s come to be so far and what’s yet to take shape.

The very first story I wrote in this series was The Sand and the Foam, which after countless drafts has yet to...

Yikes!  Man do I owe you all an explanation.  I overlooked some critical emails regarding the site hosting and, long story short, the site was dead for many months.  Honestly, it was oversight combined with procrastination–I kept getting frustrated at technical challenges and set the website aside.  Mea culpa.

Anyway…

Sooo much has happened since I last abandoned you all:

Not long ago my third published story, Karma Garden, appeared in Papercuts Magazine.  It was an exciting accomplishment for me in a number of ways.  You can read it online here, and I’ll take this opportunity to share some background.

Obviously, as the title implies, the concept of karma plays a role.  I’d like to believe that it exists.  Not just as hipster-appropriated philosophy, but as the unminted currency of the Universe, managed in quantum blockchains and dispensed as earned.

When I se...

Yeah, it’s been a while since I unpacked anything here, so I’ll spare you arambling preamble and just whip something out.

October was a crazy month, the worst US presidential election ever notwithstanding. In between health-driven dips, I actually managed to add and edit a lot of words and some of them actually went places.

First I want to go over my first public reading event, chronological order be damned.

I started onthis thing months in advance, largely because nabbing a good slot at...

Oh this is good this is GOOD best thing I’ve written in weeks. I’ll let it simmer, run through ONE MORE TIME early tomorrow and submit. YES!

Submit

Oh crap I can’t believe I misspelled two words and spell check didn’t catch them before submitting. Stupid spell check.

So… leave as is, or withdraw, correctand resubmit? Withdraw and resubmit. But won’t that make me look worse? What kind of editor needs THAT crap? They’ll see the other 9876 words spelled correctly and figure, “hey, this wri...

I can’t believe I’m writing this article. I’m anything but naive, but I want to believe that all submitting writers know better than to commit the career-killing errors I’m about to address.

And yet, here I am having to point out the patently obvious, because there are writers out there putting editors and slush readers through some truly crazy crap.

So here are a few hard-and-fast rules that really are not optional for the professional writer. It’s mainly targeted toward Science Fiction, Fan...

I posted recently about finally getting fiction published, and promised I’d dive into what was behind the story. So here we go!

First some general background. I’ve been imagining alternate worlds most of mylife it seems, especially after moving from San Diego, California to Texas at age six. I suspectthat I must have really missed home, and escaping into unreal places helped ease the shock of disparity. If you’ve never been to one or both states, trust me: there’s disparity.

I started writing...