Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on December 10th, 2016 in College, My Life 
At 5 p.m. on Thursday, I left the University of Oklahoma seven credit hours closer to a graduate degree in Professional Writing. Fourteen credit hours down, eighteen to go. This semester I took Tutorial and Creative Nonfiction. In Creative Nonfiction we developed nonfiction book proposals. Throughout the semester we wrote query letters, researched markets, developed chapter summaries, penned a synopsis of our books, and even wrote sample chapters. I didn’t realize how much work we had done until the end of the semester, when we assembled all of those components into a single proposal. In addition to that project, we… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on November 26th, 2016 in College, My Life 
I am thankful for all the obvious things one should be thankful for (life, health, work), but one thing that hit me this week was how thankful I am for the graduate writing program I’m enrolled in. I’ve attended college for lots of reasons over the years — because I wanted to start something, because I needed to finish something, because I didn’t know what else to do — but right now, I’m going to school because I want to. We are paying for my classes out of pocket, and it’s not cheap. That’s not any kind of badge of… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on August 24th, 2016 in College, Main 
Last Thursday, Mason and Morgan went back to school. Today, it was my turn. This semester I’ll be taking three graduate classes: Commercial Nonfiction, Graduate Tutorial in Writing, and Epublishing, for a total of eight credit hours. I suppose it’s not very cool to admit that I am looking forward to each of these classes. (I’m okay with that.) In Commercial Nonfiction Book, we’ll be going through the process of planning, writing, pitching and marketing a nonfiction book. I know there are things I could have done to make Commodork and Invading Spaces better, and with other nonfiction books in… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on May 17th, 2016 in College, Main, Reviews, Writing 
When I tell my friends that my writing professor (Deborah Chester) wrote the book on writing genre fiction, I’m being quite literal. Okay, so maybe she didn’t write the book on writing genre fiction, but she wrote a book on the subject, and a darned good one too. It’s called The Fantasy Fiction Formula, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. In 264 pages, Chester walks you step-by-step through the process of writing a fiction novel. If you have stared at a blank computer screen wondering where to start, or started writing a novel only to hit a dead end… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on May 16th, 2016 in College, My Life, WritingBack in January at the beginning of last semester, I created a side blog (write.robohara.com) to track the creation of my novel. The semester’s over and my work on the novel is done, so yesterday afternoon I exported all the posts, deleted the blog, and imported them over here into the Writing category if you want to read them. If you subscribe to email updates for this blog, it’s possible you received a flurry of emails from my website when I imported them. Sorry about that. I got the grade for my novel’s rough draft back last week. I got… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on May 5th, 2016 in College, Main 
It’s been quiet around the blog for the past couple of weeks — my apologies for that. I hate writing blog entries that don’t say anything more than “sorry for not writing blog entries,” so I’ll add a bit more. Graduate school has turned out to be more time intensive than I estimated. I’ve spent the past four months writing 50,000 words for my Writing the Novel class. Over the first two months I wrote and turned in the first 25,000 words, and I’ve spent the past two months not only writing the next 25,000 words but also fixing all… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on February 19th, 2016 in College, Main 
I ran across this poster yesterday at school. Based on the picture and the ceramic-tiled wall it was taped you, you can probably guess where I saw it. Specifically I was in the Gaylord building at OU, home to the school’s journalism, mass communications, and professional writing students. I cheated on a writing assignment for school once. I was in third grade. Our teacher gave us a week to write and illustrate a limerick. I struggled for several days to come up with a good one, but came up blank every night. The night before our homework was due, I… (read more)
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