It took me a long time to finish this list, and I did start it in July, like usual. There’s just a lot to recommend from what I was reading. And a few things I’m not going to recommend, mentioned below. A good reading month, all in all. Read a recently published history of 1929. I […]
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This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to to pick up a copy. You can buy copies in ebook. Here’s a link to the ebook on the WMG Books site, but you can get the ebook anywhere. […]
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This rather short list makes it look like I didn’t read much in June, but I did. I had some misfires (as you can see), and I read quite a few things that I didn’t think were worth recommending. And then there’s Kelley Armstrong… I binged the Kelley Armstrong Rockton/Haven’s Rock series until I caught […]
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With school over (as of the first week of May), I have more time to read. I occasionally binged a novel. I’ve had some down days as the chronic health issues flared and on one lovely day, I read two entire novels, something I hadn’t done since the damn dental surgeries of 2023. It was […]
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I do most of my business writing on Patreon these days, but roughly once per month, I’ll put a post for free on this website. This post initially went live on my Patreon page on December 22, 2024. If you go to Patreon, you’ll find other posts like this one. Glocalization In the past year, […]
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To download an audio version of this post, click here. At the beginning of August, Patreon had what some termed a payment meltdown. Some creators couldn’t access their payments. Banks notified some Patreon backers that their payments were being flagged as fraudulent. Patreon claimed that the problems weren’t one problem; they were two problems. For […]
Continue ReadingMy cat died in June. He wasn’t just any cat. He was what Dean and I call “a heart cat.” We have cats whom we love and cherish, and then we have special cats—the ones who simply take over our hearts and hold them hostage. Galahad was the best of the best, and we had him for fifteen years.
I’m telling you this not to get sympathy, but because Gally’s death factored into my process this summer. I knew he was going to go at some point, but he went fast. Fine one week, gone the next. Not as fast as our Ella, who literally died in an instant (vet thinks heart attack or stroke) in February, but still, faster than expected.
That, on top of the deaths of several friends since the first of the year, some close and some not as close as they once were, left me reeling. I hadn’t realized how down I was until I figured out that my writing had nearly ground to a halt.
In fact, the one thing that kept me going was the schedule I had drawn up earlier in the year…
Continue ReadingAs I’m revising the old Dealbreakers book, I am finding a lot of material that no longer applies. 2011-2013 was a transitional period in the ebook revolution. Traditional publishers didn’t know anything about ebooks, and writers had a lot more leeway in what they could do.
Now, things are so different that some of the contracts I’m touching feel toxic to me. I want to wash my hands after holding them.
Continue ReadingAs I wrote earlier this year, the changes in the publishing industry continue to smack me in the head. I learned the old publishing industry very well—the one that existed from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. I survived the early 2000s, and then indie publishing came along. I started this blog—in a different form […]
Continue ReadingI’ve been very frustrated in the last several weeks because some of my preconceptions got blown out of the water. I’ve been dealing directly with some traditionally published writers for various projects, and some of the things I’ve encountered have been head-shaking. I’ll be blogging about a few of those things in the future, with the names changed to protect the—innocent? Ignorant?—I’m not sure which label to use. Suffice to say some of the things I’ve run into are simply and completely unbelievable to me, in 2016….
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