Do to unforeseen difficulties, I didn’t have a chance to write up the rest of the Expo. I’ll do so in the next week or so. Instead, the planned series continues. I have never read Michael Chabon’s book, The Wonder Boys, but I love the movie. It has two of my favorite actors—Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr.—and a stellar supporting cast. It’s also an […]
Business Musings: Storytelling Universes
I just spent a week talking in-depth about fiction. We held our annual anthology workshop here at the Oregon Coast. We’re trying to come up with a new name for the workshop, because the “anthology” workshop is our personal shorthand. A lot of our workshops’ names are simply shorthand, because we haven’t spent enough time thinking about marketing the workshops. We kinda eased into teaching […]
Recommended Reading List: February 2018
I’d like to say I had no time for leisure reading this month, and while that’s mostly true, it doesn’t feel true. I spent most of the month reading for the anthology workshop. 1.2 million words of really great fiction, some of which will appear in upcoming Fiction Rivers. I mentioned the Justice issue of Fiction River last month. This month, I line-edited another Fiction […]
Business Musings: Mentors, Inspiration, and The Future
At 57, I’m finding myself in a strange position in life. My mentors are dying. Last month, Ursula K. Le Guin left us. I’ve known Ursula personally for more than twenty-five years. I never knew her well. We sat on panels together in the Northwest, although never (to my recollection) at a convention. We’d done bookstore events side by side over the years, and whenever […]
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 […]
Business Musings: Changing Tastes
I cringe at times, because I came of age when the arguments were loud, particularly in sf, about what was and wasn’t appropriate for the genre. Whether I agreed or not, those arguments went in.
It took me forever to write space opera, and it took some creative traditional editors to buy it. Nowadays, we can publish what we want, indie if traditional publishing doesn’t want what we’ve done, and public opinion shouldn’t make a difference.
Business Musings: Hidden Treasures
What a fascinating few weeks I’ve had. At the end of May, I hit most of my major writing deadlines. I’m turning my attention to short stories and to a massive project I’m doing for Baen Books, under the unwieldy title Tough Mothers, Great Dames, and Warrior Princesses: Classic Stories By Women in Science Fiction. (Yes, I’m considering another title, but still haven’t come up […]
Recommended Reading List: August, 2012
I read a lot in August, but at the beginning of the month I felt like I was paying for my successful July. A book I really looked forward to by a writer new to me turned out to be a slog. Characters I didn’t like saying disagreeable things about other characters I didn’t like. I’ve encountered this four times in “the book of the […]
The Business Rusch: The End of the Unprofessional Writer
On 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 he’s received from traditional publishers have been slashed to the […]
Odds and Ends
I still have some catching up to do from my trip—a few things to tell you about the travels and a few notes, in addition to a lot of business blogs and some writing blogs. I came home to the expected jetlag and the unexpected efficiency of my editors. I thought—before I left—that I’d have the rest of September off. But I’m going to be […]
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