I’m still behind on posting these, but I’m catching up, despite emergency vet visits and five dentist visits for me so far. (That’s so fun. Not.) I’m getting there, though. May was a hectic month as well, with the end of school, the end of a cold, another workshop, and lots of visitors. I still […]
Continue ReadingWe 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 […]
Continue ReadingI 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, […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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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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 […]
Continue ReadingSo, 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 […]
Continue ReadingYeah, 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 […]
Continue ReadingThe 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 […]
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