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A proposal: Stop being passionate about your writing. Writing is not dating. You are not trying to find a spouse or get to third base with your manuscript. You may find yourself enthusiastic about a project, passionate or even obsessed, but those feelings will fade over time, much like when you were dating in high…
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I want to query known predator agents so they’ll request my work. They’ll tell me they charge a reading fee because they’re so busy. I’ll respond that I charge a writing fee because I’m so busy. I will gladly pay their reading fee if they pay my writing fee. Bitches.
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Fantasy characters are dicks. In fiction, in D&D adventures, anywhere “adventurer” is available as a life choice, people are dicks. You see it all the time. Main character meets Douchebag McAsshole and DMcA immediately starts talking down to him. I’m a wizard. I’m a barbarian. I don’t bow before anyone. I don’t show any semblance…
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One WIP at a time. There’s a reason I have that rule, a very important reason. When you’re writing your novel and things get hard, your imagination is your worst enemy. When people talk about ideas of how to get inspired, they’re ignoring a greater problem: only writing when you’re inspired. You need to be…
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If not for a dead battery, I would have passed 50,000 words yesterday in my WIP. I instead passed it this morning. Making a similar comment on Twitter yesterday, I pondered why I put so much stock in 50,000 words. Certainly it doesn’t represent the end point of the manuscript nor the midpoint. I have…
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LurkerWithout reads a billion books a month. This is why I value his feedback as a beta reader. He reads a book a day, so I consider him a measure of the purchasing public. He’s the target audience I’m aiming for, people who like to read fantasy. I have no delusions of being the author…
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Along with telling me early on that her attitude toward minorities was incorrect, one of the other (few) appropriate lessons my mother taught me was the importance of voting. It was 1980 or 1982 when she took me to our local polling station (which also happened to be my pre-school). I got to watch while…
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My routine on a writing week and a reading week are pretty similar. Spend an hour on the commuter rail either reading or writing. Spend 20 minutes on the subway reading. (Writing on the subway is very difficult, and I do it very infrequently). While I have a number of samples and one novel on…