A Year of Year’s Bests

I am having a wonderful, marvelous, totally nifty year. Or maybe I had that year in 2015. Hard to say, really. Just depends on how you look at things. Here’s what I mean. My novella, “Inhuman Garbage,” appeared in two best of the year volumes in July. Depending on what you prefer to read, you have the choice of reading the novella in Gardner Dozois’s […]

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Business Musings: Serious Writer Voice

A lot of the stories I read this past year had wonderful plots. They had great characters and lovely twists. The stories were published, remember, and so they all had something unusual, something strong.

But that something generally wasn’t voice….

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Bargains, Short Stories, and the Final Interim Fate

Being offline has put me behind on the news. First, and most important, as of today, you can get the final book in the Interim Fates trilogy. Brittany Bends takes place in my old hometown of Superior, Wisconsin….

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A New Short Story, A Disaster, and Cat Pictures

For years, I’ve enjoyed the Chicks in Chainmail anthologies, edited by Esther M. Friesner. Humor, fantasy, warrior women…what’s not to love? A year or so ago, she asked me to be in the latest volume, Chicks and Balances, which she edited with John Helfers. I thought about it, wasn’t really inspired by actual chainmail, so I thought about what armor really is, and when it’s needed…and somehow, I ended up at the Academy Awards, on the red carpet, with demons. Yeah, that makes sense—in a Rusch kinda way.

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Recommended Reading List: February 2014

I read 250 manuscripts by professional writers this month. All of the stories were good. Some fit anthologies better than others. We held a writing workshop where six of us edited for Fiction River. You will see some tremendous upcoming stories, not just in FR, but in other magazines as well. Because once the editing left my control (I was editing a volume called Past […]

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The Business Rusch: With A Little Help From My Friends (Discoverability Part 11)

When we set up the anthology workshop that we held last week, Dean Wesley Smith told everyone that they would have a great opportunity to network. After all, 50 professional writers whose work runs the gamut of the fiction genres would be there from all over the world. A few of the new attendees worried about that admonition because, as introverts, being in a new […]

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The Business Rusch: Social Media (Discoverability Part 10)

 As I got deep into this discoverability series, I promised that I would examine marketing strategies from passive to active. I have to abandon that promise now, because most everything we’ll discuss from here on out will be active. By active, I mean you’ll have to do something—write something, design something, or pay for something—and you’ll have to do it several times. You had to […]

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Fiction River News!

Fiction River #2 will be coming out in about a month. I can share both the final cover for the trade paper and the list of names in the volume. John Helfers did a fantastic job editing this issue. It’s got some edgy stories, and powerful stories (which are, sometimes, one and the same). I’m really pleased with our second issue. So subscribe now in order […]

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The Business Rusch: The Bad Book

This week, I finished reading a bad book by one of my favorite authors. Well, “finished reading” isn’t accurate. “Paged through the last half” is probably better. The book was astoundingly bad. The author decided to go 50 Shades of Grey on me when she’d never written more than a fade-to-black sex scene before. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that her protagonist […]

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Recommended Reading: February 2011

I got a lot of reading done in February, and I’m not sure how.  I was writing every minute I could and I also co-taught a workshop with Dean, Denise Little, and John Helfers.  Did lots of reading there, but you won’t see those stories until they hit print.  Very good stories they were too. What amazes me is how much I read and discarded […]

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