The journal and sometimes blog of author, Joseph L. Selby.
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Covering All the Bases
This post should almost be labeled a redux because I’ve posted so much of the conversation before. I am once again dealing with that balancing act of craft vs voice. I think more aspiring writers would do well to actually listen, absorb, and apply the feedback they receive from agents when they query. Too often…
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Nostalgia
Some friends and I were talking about individualized education, which is a real passion of mine. That led to stories about our grade school experiences and those times when the teachers didn’t know what to do with the advanced kids (set them aside, have them self-teach, and assign extra work was my horrible experience). This…
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2013: A Singular Endeavor
I don’t normally do a year in review because my pursuit of publication has been an ongoing effort for over four years now and that story has only changed somewhat. Write a novel -> query, write a novel -> query, start new year, repeat. That was 2009 through 2011. Then came 2012, the year of…
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Sex Scenes and Sexuality
I have, in my time, both acted as and utilized beta readers. With that, I’ve found that different authors have different policies in how they treat their beta readers. I have rules on how I deal with them. They are unpaid volunteers that are doing me a great service without any promise of return. I…
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Did we put the cart before the horse?
I have a growing number of draft posts. It almost feels like I’ve been actively updating this journal because I have so many posts started that the interaction was initiated even if it wasn’t completed. I’ve been journaling in one form or another for a decade now, opening my first LiveJournal account in February of…
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Where Did All My Free Time Go?
Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted. Mea culpa. I tore a tendon in my shoulder and the recuperation (ongoing) has really thrown my routines for a loop. I’ve been working from home a lot or not working and going to physical therapy a lot. It may have been a good habit to…
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Wind Sprint: Serenity
I tell Liz Poole all the time that I’m never going to write Urban Fantasy. But an opening line while I was driving from physical therapy gave me an idea for a character that turned an espionage thriller plot I had been ruminating on into a genuine urban fantasy. The original espionage was inspired by…
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Sooper Groops!
Supers fiction is perhaps the smallest niche of sf/f. Supers can be fun or it can be incredibly cliche (if you grew up reading comics–which if you’re interested in supers fiction is a good bet). I tend to think of supers creatively as graphic novels for that same background of comics reading. I can’t think…
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Be Sure to Use the Appropriate Nasality
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I have a few drafts that I’ll probably never publish (that happens from time to time), but I have a really good reason why. I’ve been writing like Robert E. Howard. Not specifically in his style, but when he wrote Conan, he said that the barbarian himself stood…
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That’s Been Done Before
I’ve commented before that there are some parts of my beloved genre that just bore the shit out of me. “New” is really “The same but from a different persecptive.” How can you tell? Because our titles sound like they came out of a sausage maker. Fantasy in, delicious sausage out. One link looks much…
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That Was a Little Terrifying
When I get up in the morning, I write. When I get to work, I spend all day in a cubicle on a computer. When I head home, I write. When I get home, I am often on a computer. I live the classic American sedentary lifestyle. I type 99 words per minutes according to…