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How Long Does It Take Me to Write A Novel?
I Get That Question… Honestly, most professional writers do all the time. Of course, the question comes from people who never read this blog. And without lying, I often tell them what they want to hear. (I never tell them I have written a full novel in five days while traveling.) For example, this book I just finished tonight I started back in late December. So to make those who believe in myths, I can safely say it takes me about six months to write a short novel. Let’s not mention that I did a novel in five days while in a hotel room in Las Vegas in January. Or have…
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A Fun Series
Ghost of a Chance Series… I am just finishing up a book called The Deep Sunset: A Ghost of a Chance Novel. The original titles on these things and complete lack of branding made these almost impossible to sell. So I renamed all the books and Allyson did a nifty series branding on these, sort of a take-off on the new Poker Boy covers, but not really. I will go back at some point and redo the covers on Smith’s Monthly with these novels in them. I love this new branding and it really gave me a boost to finish the novel I’ve been puttering along on and tonight I…
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The Magic Bakery: Chapter Three
Chapter Three… How do you slice a magic pie? The answer is simply as many ways as you want. The wonderful thing about copyright is that you can license any part of it. And you can name the part and dictate the terms and define the shape of the part. I know this is difficult to imagine. And the pie analogy sort of falls apart because pie is a physical thing that can only be sliced in so many ways. But image the pie is solid and you have a saw that can slice off a piece so thin you can barely see the slice under a microscope. Yup, you…
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I Have A Publishing Belief System
Actually, a number of them… No surprise to anyone who follows this blog, huh? So let me explain a few of my belief systems. Agents… Agents should pay authors what is called a “shopping agreement fee” for the right to submit their manuscript to editors. Shopping agreements are used all the time in Hollywood and are basically a fee like $1,000 for a limited time (six months to a year) for the right to shop the work. Author keeps the money no matter if the work sells or not. (That would put some skin in the game for agents.) The writer is the one who did the work, owns the…
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Another Scam Firing Up
This Scam Starts in Traditional Publishing… It’s brand new, but I fear it will spread. Writers are that afraid. So what is this new scam? Sensitivity Readers. Not kidding you. Traditional publishers are hiring “sensitivity readers” to read books before they are bought or published. Wow, the amount of stupidity has just hit a new level in publishing, far higher than my cyclical belief thought it could. You can find the article and read it yourself if you want to be disgusted. http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-publishers-hiring-book-readers-to-flag-sensitivity-20170215-story.html Sadly, some people will hire themselves out to do this and new writers are going to buy into this scam just as they bought into the scam of needing…
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Logic: The Lost Art in Being a Fiction Writer
Don’t Try Logic… Dangerous to Your Myths I have been going on now in numbers of posts about how we fiction writers sabotage ourselves. Fear without real cause is the normal reason. But I have another deeper reason tonight. Lack of logic. In a few posts I used math to try to make sense of the silliness of a few myths. Math tends to be very logical. Simply put, fiction writers, when it comes to the very basis of being a fiction writer, toss all logic out the window and listen to people who have never written or published a book. This goes on from the very beginning of every writer’s career.…
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Failure Must Be An Option
FAILURE MUST BE AN OPTION (I first did a version of this post in 2012, then brought it forward and updated it for 2014, and now updated again, here it is as part of this year-end flurry of posts to help get ready for 2017.) I’ll bet a few of you got very uneasy by me starting off a blog post with: “Failure Must Be An Option.” This post is about how to move forward with your writing. And to do that, you must fail, over and over to become an artist in this business and to just survive. And that’s normal and perfectly fine. (I really should repeat that last sentence.)…
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Artistic Freedom and Being a Victim
Getting Tired… You would think that eventually fiction writers, as a group, would start getting tired of being victims. I mean really tired. One of the wonderful things that this new world has given all writers is artistic freedom. We’ve talked here about some of the ramifications of how writers use that freedom over the last few weeks. But another aspect of the freedom writers have is to make choices in the areas of how they will work, who they will work with, and so on. These choices are very much aspects of artistic freedom. In the old days of traditional-publishing-only, I used to scoff at writers sitting in bars…
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Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Traditional Publishing Takes Less Time
This chapter came from a conversation at a writer’s lunch and hearing this myth from dozens of writers over the last few months. Finally just got fed up with it. And when I am fed up, duck. Chapter Five There is this belief that if a writer could just get a traditional publisher to take care of them, all would be great, they could only write, create great art, eat candy all day, sign books for adoring fans, and roses would grow in the dark out of their asses. Or something like that. This myth comes from traditional publishers because, in this modern world, it’s about the only thing they can…
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Topic of the Night: Three Types of Thinking
Topic of the Night: Three Types of Thinking More than likely this will be a topic I’ll talk about regularly in numbers of ways. But for tonight, what got my focus on this was a comment made by the Passive Guy on a post he put up from Kris. (Scroll down to Kris’s post, his comment is under hers.) He said, “Under current contract practices, the author is the only person who has to think in the long term while everyone else in the publishing business is focused on the short term.” Wow, is that the truth. In so many ways. And so few writers focus on long term in business. In fact, my…