Author | Joseph L. Selby

Category: Uncategorized

  • Impacted: A Meme

    A forum I frequent started a meme today. Write as a scene a memory that informed your life. My response was a little longer than I felt appropriate for a forum, so I decided to put it here instead. He liked watching the numbers. Elevators weren’t as fun as escalators, but at least they showed…

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  • GOO! (RE: He-Man)

    I often site the original He-Man mini-comics that came with the toys as one of the largest influences of my writing career. It’s very true. I was five when I was allowed to buy my first He-Man figure and those comics stirred a creativity in me that I had never known before. …AND NOW THEY’RE…

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  • Reevaluating the Briar Patch

    I have–to this point–been consistent regarding my opinion of self-publishing and its relevance to my own career. That opinion has not been very positive. For all the anecdotal examples that are bandied about the internet of self-publishing success, the majority of self-published work (in my own anecdotal exploration) is atrociously bad. Of course it is.…

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  • Big 5-0

    Elizabeth Poole has passed 50 followers on her blog, leaving us little 15 subscriber folks in the dust! In celebration of this milestone, she has called for a blog fest! Take your older writing and post it to show what kind of writers we used to be! Now I’ve lost a lot of my older…

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  • Sonny Liston

    If you know the name Sonny Liston at all, you know it’s the guy on the mat in the famous Mohammed Ali photo. It’s one of the most highly recognizable/promoted sports pictures in American sports history. There’s Ali talking smack and some boxer on the mat he’s just knocked down in the first round. That’s…

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  • Sweet, Sweet Crazy

    I don’t hop on the bandwagon too often, but this was just too much fun not to share. I’ve seen it a couple places, but Pat at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist convinced me to click and read the comments. It’s best if you read the review (which I think is incredibly fair), but then you have…

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  • Query’d

    So I posted a three drafts of the query for JEHOVAH’S HITLIST (twice as primary posts and once as a response). I got some ingenious feedback from Elizabeth Poole following my third draft that took in it a whole new but slightly different direction. I am withholding the final draft until querying has passed and/or…

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  • Comments, Questions, Criticisms

    We’ve all seen the blog posts and Tweets by agents of the horrible responses some queriers send them a rejection. It can be fun to rubberneck such responses, watching the car wreck that is that person’s nonsexistent career and wonder What were you thinking? That’s a no brainer, though. I assume none of you would…

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  • QUERY: JEHOVAH’S HITLIST (another draft)

    In September ’10, I made a first draft of a query for Jehovah’s Hitlist. It’s a rule peoples, never go with your first draft. Of anything. Not your novel. Not your query. So I’ve written a few drafts of JH (and will be doing one more) so it’s time to put the nose to the…

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  • Patapan

    The year is 1816. President Benedict Arnold made the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon Bonaparte thirteen years previous. Defeated at Leipzig and driven from the French throne by the Sixth Coalition, Bonaparte fled to New Orleans. There French loyalists rallied around their emperor. They seceded as a US territory and declared themselves New France (Burgundy?). Napoleon’s…

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