Author | Joseph L. Selby

Category: Uncategorized

  • A Paragraph

    If you read industry blogs at all, you have seen an agent or two (or two hundred) occasionally talk about reaction emails. Reaction emails are when an amateur (not an aspiring author) shows that he or she is no way emotionally ready for the challenges of publishing and may never be. They submit their query…

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  • Like Edinburgh, England

    Let’s begin here: If you’re writing in a contemporary setting, referring to certain foreign nations can rip a reader out of your story if you incorrectly describe that location because you’re an American and you don’t really understand how X country works. Example: United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy. It is not a republic or…

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  • Relax! (Go to it)

    As previously mentioned, I participated in Sara Megibow’s Writer’s Digest webinar last week. She had a lot of good points and went over various features of her clients that caught her attention during the query process (all her clients except for one came through the slush pile). Not all the things she mentioned had to…

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  • Oh, Hubris, you so crazy

    So 85% of my site migration is complete. I finally visualized how I want to display my writing. I’ve arranged the menu. Now I just need to handle the code and create the necessary files for that code to work. Bouncing back and forth between JavaScript and an iframe. I had been leaning to the…

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  • Words and Games

    The topic of custom words in fantasy has come up in a variety of places I visit lately (Book Country, et al.), and while I don’t hold it against people who choose to have names for months other than January-December, I find it a distraction and a lot of work for very little return. So…

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  • The Red Pen

    Your pardon at the quality of the pictures, but I took those with my phone which does not have the best camera. They get the point across, though. I received feedback from an agent awhile back, feedback I was uncertain about. I never rush right into feedback assuming that a person is right or wrong.…

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  • A Quick Tutorial

    It’s Memorial Day here in the US, a time to honor those that have served in uniform. We have parades. We grill. We post on Facebook that we honor their memory. What I’m finding, however, is that people don’t know how to properly refer to America’s armed forces. I see a lot of “in memory…

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  • It’s a Code!

    Every once in awhile I’m in the mood to write a conspiracy thriller story. So I’m updating a website to a new edition. The editor gives me chapter summaries in a Word doc, which implies they’re all new. But they’re not. Most of them are identical to the previous edition. BUT not all of them…

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  • Changes are Afoot

    I’m in this rock/hard place situation where Webs.com is not keeping pace with technology, specifically the improvements to HTML like iframes. I have changes I want to make to my website that I simply cannot do with webs. It’s showing its age and my site looks much more amateurish than it did three years ago…

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  • And the Blind Shall See

    If I had known that I was going to attend Sara Megibow’s Writer’s Digest webinar today, I would have posted earlier. It was a last minute decision1, and boy am I glad I attended. It was a seminar on querying. I have attended such a seminar before hosted by her boss, Kristin Nelson. That seminar…

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