Michael Fiegel's Blog

Blackbird was not written in one place, at one time, in one way. It came together in bits and pieces over the course of 17 years, on at least seven different computers that I can think of. The writing was spread out across four different states, in at least two dozen different places including various apartments and homes, bed and breakfasts and hotel rooms and airports. Parts of it were written in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, BBedit, Notepad++, Adobe InDesign, and Scrivener.

Things have gone...

Once I’d finished writing Blackbird, it took quite a while for me to figure out that I hadn’t finished writing Blackbird. I realized that I had only written a first draft, of course, and took appropriate actions: I selected some friends to be my “beta readers” and sent them some proof copies using Lulu.com. Then I eagerly waited throughout August and September for those proofs to be returned to me, covered in edits. But despite all that I was still convinced I was nearly done.

I really wasn’t...

Blackbird was first brought into the world on July 6, 1999, and will finally be published on November 7, 2017. Quite a long journey, but to see only the bookends you miss much of what went into making it what it ended up being. Perhaps it’s only interesting to me, but then I’m probably the only one reading this, so that’s what this entry will be about.

My recollections of the earliest days of working on Blackbird are the most sketchy. Not only was it at least five computers ago, but the early...

Fast food seems to be a theme in a lot of what I write. In Iconoclast, a text-based MUD I wrote most of, I spent an inordinate amount of time implementing an assortment of fast food restaurants around the city of New Aurora, both in and out of the mall food court, despite the fact that most players never bothered to visit them. Of course, there was Ninja Burger, the fictional fast food chain run entirely by ninja, which was first just a silly website, and then an RPG, and then got completely...

In late May of 1999, I moved from Buffalo, NY to the Washington, DC area. This wasn’t a one-shot thing; it involved a few car trips back-and-forth, in the ’88 Chevy Beretta I’d inherited. The first two trips went fine, but unbeknownst to me the car was on its last legs. And so it happened that on my way back to Virginia on the third trip, it overheated and died on the side of the road, just outside of South Williamsport, PA. Home of the Little League World Series, and, as it turns out, the pl...

Today is sort of the beginning of the end of the beginning.

I started writing Blackbird, my first novel, on July 6, 1999, but while there’s clearly only one beginning, there were multiple endings. Drafts, revisions, times when I thought it was really done, times when I doubted. Now, though, the part where no one really knows about it but me and some close friends is really finally almost nearly over. With the Goodreads Contest running, several advance readers checking out the book, and the pu...