Blog
The Main Attraction
Blog content is categorized by the topics shown below. To read more about a specific category, click on the + on the right side of each toggle. Otherwise, scroll past the category list to see the complete set of blog posts.
Brainstorming
Where I’ll be doing all of the story planning and brainstorming of ideas. (Click to view posts in this category)
News
Looking for announcements? Look no further! (Click to view posts in this category)
Personal Life
What’s going on in my life including emotional checkups and how it’s affecting my writing. (Click to view posts in this category)
Writing Process
The how of my writing life. How I use various tools and theories and what works for me and doesn’t. (Click to view posts in this category.)
Writing Tools
Books, classes, software, etc. What I work with and why. (Click to view posts in this category.)
How Old Is Tim?
(Edit: My spouse thought the original post was a little confusing with all the time frames criss-crossing so I reworked it, hopefully explaining things a little better. Sorry if you read the original and were confused before. Believe me, it confused me for a while,...
Week 1 Check-in
Emotional Overview A quick check-in showing my current emotional state. (Higher numbers mean greater degrees of emotion.)DepressionAnxietyStress(I'll probably try to do check-ins on Saturday or Sunday nights during my dead times at work. Of course, if something...
Baby Steps In Creating a Process
The Journey of a Thousand Miles ... Whew! All this preliminary work and we really haven't started yet. Time to get a move on. To review (in case you haven't read the other posts yet): I've defined my tool set: As far as initial setup is concerned, I'm going to...
Deciding on a Story Structure
If you've read just about any book on story structure these days, you're bound to see statements like "every successful story follows this pattern," "immutable laws of story construction," "this applies to all stories and there's never any difference," etc., etc.,...
And We’re Live!
Welcome to the web site for Mystical Bear! It's been a long time coming as I first had this idea several years ago. There was one half-hearted attempt then to bring it into being but it got nowhere. Now, however, I've had a major attitude shift and I've been...
Deciding on a genre
(Note: what you're about to read isn't the usual format for a post in the "Brainstorming" category. Usually, you would see the complete back and forth of ideas. This post only shows an abbreviated version of what I did offline recently. I'm only including it out of...