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Saturday Night Reading
Still finishing up some reading… Just about done. Which, actually, is kind of sad. I haven’t enjoyed reading this many great stories in a long time. I will be back reporting page counts, stories done, novels done, and all that shortly, including the exercise routine. (grin) Plus I have a few more rants/blogs/questions for this coming week that might be fun to talk about. We shall see. Don’t forget… just over a week until the March online workshops fire up. Openings in all of them at the moment.
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Looking at the Writing Advice
Very Seldom Do You Get a Stage Four Writer Being Honest… Most either play into the myths for fear of hurting their own writing sales or they say nothing. Some figure their way of doing things is just their way and would never work for anyone else. But Joe Lansdale, in a very simple article, sort of carefully told the truth about his writing. If you haven’t read it yet either from an original source or my earlier post, do so now. The Rules of Being a Professional Writer He started off by giving only two simple rules that I completely agree with. One, you must read. Second, you must write.…
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Writing Advice and Fun List
The Rules of Being a Professional Writer Also fun, Dayton Ward who is an amazing Star Trek writer and collector did a list of the top ten Star Trek books he wish he would have written. My Captan Proton book made his list. Fun! http://www.startrek.com/article/ten-for-ward-trek-books-i-wish-id-written
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Fantastic New Bundle… Escapist
We All Need to Escape… Especially in these times and in this bundle is some fantastic escape fiction. Not only does it have a Fiction River anthology in it with a bunch of stories (including one from me) but it also has my origin Poker Boy novel called The Slots of Saturn. And it has an amazing collection of Kris’s stories, plus novels and stories by some amazing writers. This bundle really, really will help you escape, I promise you. Just Poker Boy and Front Desk Girl fighting Ghost Slots will do that, I promise. (grin) The full official write-up and all information is below. Get it for a limited time at…
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The Years Go By
A Great Picture… Not sure where it was taken recently. At one convention or another, but it came across Facebook and I was stunned at what a great picture it was of four of the greatest writers in science fiction. And how we had all aged. (We all used to look young, honest.) David Brin (on the right) is almost exactly my age. Greg Bear (on the left) is a year younger. Vernor Vinge in the blue jacket is six years older than me and Gregory Benford is nine years older than I am. And they all started publishing in the middle to late 1960s except for David who started…
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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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Just Reading…
Nothing to see here… Just piles and piles and piles of manuscripts. Kris and I are old-time editors and we read everything in paper manuscript format. Great fun and our cats are too old to care about the strange manuscript piles to cause issues. Clearly we need kittens. Now back to the pile… night.
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I’m Reading…
…A lot of great short stories. I’ll be able to talk more about why I am doing this in a couple of weeks. After the Anthology Workshop is finished. But note that I seldom talk about my reading in this blog. It’s just something I do. Kris calls me a stealth reader, so it feels odd to actually be sitting out in public where she can see me with a pile of manuscripts (like the old days when we were editing Pulphouse and F&SF). Reading in my family was a waste of time as far as my parents were concerned. So I learned early on to hide my reading and…
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You Can Learn Story from the HGTV Network
The Sequential Nature of a Story… Sounds like a well-duh, but so many writers are stuck in that problem. And that makes writing so much harder to do for themselves. What problem? Of course you write a story from the beginning to the end, don’t you? Nope. Basically, beginning writers believe they must start a novel on word one and write to the last word. That belief creates time-wasting things like outlines and rewriting, two of the more deadly practices to creativity ever invented by an English teacher. And if I believed I had to write from word one and not do anything but move forward until the last word,…
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Protecting Choice
When You Decide to Not Write and That’s Fine… I can name a number of major events in a person’s life that will make then flat decide to not think about going to a computer to write fiction. Valid reasons to not write. — Health — Family Health or Event — Some forms of Travel — Day Job Explosion Outside of Norm — And so on and so on… down into smaller and smaller reasons. There is a point that all of us look at why we are not writing at a given point of time and try to decide if the reason is fear or a valid reason. We…