I taught a week-long science fiction craft workshop in October, and read lots of excellent stories. I’ll mention them when they show up in print and you can find them. I’ll be amazed if editors don’t snatch these stories up. I know that Lee Allred took some for the second Fiction River special that he’s […]
Continue ReadingI am completely overwhelmed. Not because I just finished teaching a week-long workshop. Not because one of my novels decided to become triplets. Not because it’s about to become November. Because I have too much to read. Seriously. I preorder a lot of books, and pick up the rest from my favorite local bookseller. One […]
Continue ReadingAt least one per week, I get e-mails from writers who ask me if they need a pen name. The question used to be really easy to answer. If you wrote in multiple genres at the same time, you needed a pen name. Now, the answer—like the answer to everything else in publishing— is it […]
Continue ReadingConsidering how busy I was in July, I’m surprised at how much reading I managed to get done. It’s that chair, I’m sure of it. 🙂 I also read a lot of books not on this list, some truly awful books from some of my favorite writers. I realized that I loved one writer because […]
Continue ReadingThis 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 […]
Continue ReadingOn a day when most of the publishing blogosphere is dealing with Random House’s horrible Hydra publishing line, I figured I’d talk about something else. First of all, if you haven’t heard about Hydra and what it wants to do to writers who know nothing about business, check out John Scalzi’s blog. In fact, check […]
Continue ReadingI should never read the comments on other people’s writing information blogs. The comments discourage me, generally for one of two reasons. If the blog is about traditional publishing, and the authors are traditionally published only with no desire to change, I get discouraged at the amount of misinformation. If the blog is about indie […]
Continue ReadingOn July 24, 2012, Canada’s The Globe and Mail published an article titled, “There Will Be No More Professional Writers in The Future.” The article cites a number of writers, from the ubiquitous Scott Turow to Ewan Morrison who, The Globe and Mail thoughtfully tells me, is “an established British writer.” Morrison says that the advances […]
Continue ReadingThe last two weeks have been quite a revelation for me. My post on perfection led to last week’s post about writing workshops/writing culture, and even then, it wasn’t until the comment sections of both blogs that I realized just how prevalent the whole writing problem thing is. What I consider to be “the whole writing […]
Continue ReadingI read a lot of short fiction in May. I didn’t finish a lot of books. I dipped in and out of anthologies, collections, magazines, and individual short Kindle titles. I was exhausted, a lot happened this month, and I couldn’t sustain concentration long enough to finish many novels. In fact, I often forgot I […]
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