Jon Del Arroz

Not everything you read in a slush pile is negative. It’s hard not to get jaded when reading, a lot of the time, because you see the same mistakes repeatedly. But even some mistakes can give you an epiphany about your own writing that don’t click until you see it. I’ve heard it said a […]

Some of you may know that I do slush pile reading for speculative short stories. I am the first set of eyes that reads your story, and determines whether the editors should bother reading it. Since I’m going to be doing this work for the foreseeable future, I thought it may be handy to post […]

A friend of mine is sick, and it reminded me of the first time I truly recall being sick, and spending time on my back. I was probably 10 years old or so, and had a late onset of the chicken pox. It was pretty miserable. I was itchy, crabby, splotchy, everything associated with it. […]

http://flyingsparkscomic.com/archive/issue-7-page-4/ A splash page, but a pretty one.  Hey…I can post pictures here too, so I’m gonna!   But do check out the link, and the whole comic. It’s a good story, I promise. And so many more pages of this pretty art!    

I was asked by a reader, “How many words do you write per day?” Quick answer is: I wish I were that regimented! It’d certainly make my time tables easier to determine. Long answer:  It depends on what I’m doing. 1. When it comes to writing comics: I always outline an issue first when I’m […]

For those who don’t follow the comic, each wednesday I post up a new page, and so I might as well add another place to let everyone know. http://flyingsparkscomic.com/archive/issue-7-page-3/   Here’s the current page. For those who are following, they’ll see a lot of characters and storylines converging together here. I’m not saying the series […]

I’m about 40% through my first revision of my first novel, tentatively titled Starcrossed, and I started thinking about potential interesting topics along the lines of editing and revision. This part of the process is both the most challenging and rewarding part of writing, so I’m happy to pass on what I’ve learned. Novel revision is […]

I was asked today to fill out a survey for a publisher, and one of the questions was about favorite books. I won’t reprint the entire survey since I’m sure they intend to use it, but thought this was interesting. Now my top two books stay the same pretty regularly. I know this because they’re the […]

Hi, I’m Jon Del Arroz. You might remember me from such comics as: If-X, Back Row Presents, Flying Sparks. You may also know me from my short fiction in Zharmae Publishing’s anthology, The Irony of Survival. If you happen upon a TARDIS and go even further back, you’ll find my band aprilsrain  (you can search for that on iTunes), which […]