Author | Joseph L. Selby

Tag: doubts

  • The Wrong Type of Crazy

    If you haven’t been following the story from the beginning, here’s the summary. In 2009 I challenged myself: finish a novel or give up writing. I had way too many starts and way way way too few finishes. So this was it. I had a new job. I had a long commute with dedicated writing…

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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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  • 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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  • The Drawl

    I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been struggling on voice with JEHOVAH’S HITLIST. It’s not so much struggling as I can’t find it. It’s struggling in that I keep changing my mind, so the narrative text is horribly inconsistent. Here’s where I’ve been flipping. Take a nice classic rural drawl. Change of to a, drop the…

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  • The Importance of a Name

    THE TRIAD SOCIETY is a pre-steam punk fantasy. What does that mean? That means steam technology is in its early advances. I don’t have airships or the like. I have steam-infused water and other similar “inventions!” Reliarach is the first kingdom on the Crescent Sea to develop such technology, the other six kingdoms being in…

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  • Stuff Stolen from Other People

    Eric at Pimp My Novel retweeted this blog post that has a great quote: “An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts on himself.” – Irwin Shaw I’ll try to…

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  • Query Doldrums

    I’ve pretty much known what was wrong with THE TRIAD SOCIETY since I finished the first draft of the manuscript. It’s taken all this time to articulate what’s wrong with it, but there is a reason I did not launch immediately back into revision. There was something seriously wrong. I knew it. And I needed…

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  • Ponderings and Plannings

    A side note: I dislike “a novel” being included on a book cover unless the book’s title is “a novel.” I think it sounds pretentious. In fact, I think it’s intentionally pretentious to appeal to that category’s audience. I will, at some point, write a story and title it A NOVEL. Fuck your pretension. So,…

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