I had a lovely February of reading. Lots more time than I expected, which is fun. As regular readers of this feature know, I don’t recommend everything nor should I, considering I’ve also been reading 300-year-old plays for my Theatre History class. But there’s lots of good here, including a nonfiction book that everyone in […]
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I’m still playing catch-up on the lists, but I decided last month to stay current with the current reading, which feels quite good. I have more reading time, which is nice, but some of it is for school work. Lots of ancient plays and plays in translation. I’m learning a lot about storytelling, history, and […]
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Not as much reading this month as I had hoped, but then, this is the month that I didn’t sleep either, because we were dealing with the aftermath of Dean’s fall and surgery. I’m recommending a video as well as a few books and articles, which I will explain below. Much of what I did […]
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Well, October is a month that divided itself in half for me and Dean. The month was chugging along just fine when Dean tripped on a 5K (while running a 6-minute mile) and slammed into the concrete, shattering his shoulder. Suddenly we were dealing with doctors and surgery and schedules we hadn’t had before. I […]
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Writers are curious creatures. We’re a mix of insecurity and ego. The ego is there whether we admit it or not. Why else would we write stories and put them out into the world? Deep down, we believe that other people want to read these stories. For some of us (all of us?), we believe […]
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The biggest issue for the latter half of 2018 was book sales. Indies and traditional publishers both complained that book sales were down, and that a crisis was imminent. Their ideas of crisis were different, but they come from a similar source, which is the current state of disruption in the publishing industry. I wrote […]
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This post is for the hybrid writers, the ones who want to be part indie and part traditional.
What will you get if you go with the Big Five? Not money. Your book might become a Netflix series. You might become a household word. And you’ll probably still need your day job.
Continue ReadingNovember flew by for reasons I have yet to figure out. Almost all of my reading was wonderful, and I really had to work to find time to list everything. I started some of my holiday reading early, not because I want the year to end (which is different from last year), but because some […]
Continue ReadingI remember how overwhelming it was for me to make the transition to mostly indie. I’m not entirely indie. My short fiction is still hybrid, as is all of my work in translation. But I can’t see any situation where I would ever go back to a traditional publisher for my novels. The contracts are awful, the lack of support profound, and the benefits nearly nonexistent.
The traditionally published writers who are being cut loose or who are being offered terrible deals are just beginning to realize this. And they’re at a complete loss as to what to do.
I feel for them. I really do.
Continue ReadingWow. I didn’t even have a reason to start up this list until mid-June, and I’ve been reading a lot of stuff. Most of the magazines I’ve read have been of the entertainment or self-help variety; no great articles in any of them. The books, well, the books were a disaster until June 15 or […]
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