We had a surprise move in June. We found a wonderful place and decided to go for it, just like most of America, it seems. So we spent a few weeks shuffling things around. I ended up reading bits and pieces of novels, unable to concentrate. Really didn’t finish much, which is on me. July is already better. Here’s what I liked. June, 2021 […]
Recommended Reading List: July, 2019
I confess: there’s a lot of material here from June. You see, as I was about to write the last few recommendations on the June list, a massively ugly flu hit. I missed the deadline, but the list went up automatically. Incomplete, but declared done by the deadline. You won’t know what’s July or June, though, not that it matters. And I’m doing my best […]
Business Musings: Outrage Fatigue
Every time I log onto my Twitter feed, everyone is screaming at everyone else about something. Even my go-to writers are angry right now. I logged onto #Caturday last Saturday, terrified that the silly cat pictures had devolved into some kind of war between Siamese and tortoise shells, but I haven’t found that so far. Although this photo gave me a moment of concern: Granted, […]
Business Musings: Punctuation, Voice, and Control
In January, while I was preparing to teach a craft workshop here in Las Vegas, I was happily reading a lovely essay on the comma in the Oregon Quarterly. The essay, titled “For Love of the Comma,” written by Kate Dyer-Seeley, is beautifully done, and as I read, I was thinking of recommending the piece on my monthly recommended reading list—until I hit this: …I […]
Business Musings: Sales (Planning For 2019 Part 2)
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 about where we stand on the macro level in the […]
Business Musings: Taste (or Blaming The Writer)
When I teach craft workshops, one of the things I work on the hardest is teaching writers the difference between taste and “good fiction.” I put “good fiction” in quotes, because there seems to be this belief among most writers and readers that “good fiction” is something quantifiable. Certain books are “good” because they have elements that professors approve of, or elements that the culture […]
Business Musings: The People in Your Office
So, it happened again. A big name fantasy writer made his fans angry because the next book in his series hasn’t appeared in years. And, in a passing remark, he compared the comments fans make on his overdue book to those comments people make to their unemployed adult child about getting a job or to their single grandkid about getting married. Patrick Rothfuss made the […]
Business Musings: A Small Post on Negotiation
Yeah, yeah, we’re in the middle of a series on branding. But I just sat down at my computer for the first time today, at the time I usually quit writing. It’s the only day this week when I can write my blog, and while I have two in the can (and you can get them if you support me on Patreon), I don’t want […]
Business Musings: Brand Image (Branding/Discoverability)
The publishing industry has been shifting since 2009. Indie publishing has become a force since 2011 or so. At first, we writers made our work available, but the things that worked six years ago don’t work now. The problem is that the marketing gurus for writers are just other writers with an okay idea. As I’ve said all along, we writers must accept that we’re […]
Business Musings: The People in Our Offices
I’m tired. Emotionally tired. My world is changing, and personally, I wasn’t prepared for it. That my world is changing while the greater world—the real world—is also changing is just serendipity, I guess. I’ve blogged about the larger changes, just a bit, talking about how to write in dark times, but some of that post is also about writing while bad things are happening to […]
Ten Little Fen: A Spade/Paladin Novel
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