Author | Joseph L. Selby

Category: Uncategorized

  • My people, they have but one bunghole

    Extra extra extra tired today. Thus I talk to anyone and everyone to keep myself awake. This does not lead to quality work, but does lead to some fun creativity. Follow this thought process: I’m talking to my friend Michelle. She says she needs to go eat lunch before she passes out. I keep talking…

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  • Dream a Little Dream of Me

    In my last semester of college, I participated in one of the most influential classes of my university career: Senior Theatre Capstone. It was a discussion course required to graduate with a theatre degree (every arts degree had one: I took something similar for my English degree). It was lead by the department head and…

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  • POV to the FACE!

    Elizabeth Poole was talking about having double first person in her current WIP. Meaning, she has two main characters and each of them narrate their part of the story from a first-person POV. I warned against this as a style that required IMMENSE precision. If you do not perfectly nail this kind of writing, it’s…

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  • Wind Sprint: WHAT’S BEHIND THE CROOKED DOOR?

    This story began as a ponderance. I thought of it from time to time. It sat in my brain like a seed. Will it sprout or will it just lay there? It sprouted a little, but I doubted enough to make a story out of it. My wife then asked me what I was talking…

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  • Wind Sprint: THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE

    I’m not keen on giving up on a manuscript, but sometimes a thing is broke so bad it can’t be fixed1. THE SEVENTH SACRIFICE was a manuscript I abandoned because it was all wrong. There were a few chapters I enjoyed (the introductions of the tinkers), but it boiled down to Cheshire getting off his…

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  • Wind Sprints

    I wrote the first draft of THE TRIAD SOCIETY. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t bad necessarily. It just wasn’t the story I set out to write. The story I had planned was this huge intricate intrigue that spanned the politics of the university, the city, the kingdom! And in the end, a meeting made…

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  • I’ll Make a Bajillion Dollars!

    So, as we all know, the reason there is still resistance to the ebook is because some people worry about losing their pretension. How can one prove that one is better than those around one if they cannot see that the book one is reading is clearly far beyond the reading level of everyone else…

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  • The Tlot Thickens

    As I mentioned on Friday, my productivity fell to shit when I joked about being the anonymous subject of an agent’s impending rejection. I checked my email over and over and over again until the day came to a close, and it was time to go home. Of course, there was no rush to go…

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  • How to Kill Productivity

    How to Kill Productivity in Five Easy Steps Review your Twitter as you do often during the day. Reply to an agent who you follow when she asks for feedback on whether saying “it was a close call but no thank you” was cruel or encouraging. Suggest that it would be crushing at first, but…

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  • The Six Books of Harry Potter

    Nathan Bransford invited readers to post comments about Harry Potter on their own blogs and link back in his, for which this post is created. Depending on how long you’ve been following me, you might have listened to the episode of the PodgeCast or even read the older post on my LiveJournal that covered the…

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