Posted in writing, tagged the writing life on 12 May 2008 | No Comments »
I just returned from a week long workshop on marketing for fiction writers. We learned about the publishing business, how it works, who has the power, and how to get our novels the best chance they can get. A lot of classes, a lot of assignments, a lot of reading, and not much sleep.
I learned [...]
Posted in writing, tagged shameless self promotion, the writing life on 21 April 2008 | 2 Comments »
Click on the “Other Writing” tab at the top of the page and you’ll find a list of all my published short stories, poems, articles, and reviews. Also links to my previous blogs. I put this together yesterday. It was strange going through my files looking for all these items. Many many pieces I have [...]
Posted in writing, tagged the writing life on 13 April 2008 | 4 Comments »
Title: One Night and a Thousand Nights. Setting: The edge of the world. The Earth is flat. Some disaster in the interior (super volcano? massive drought?) has forced most of the population to migrate to the edge. Plot: We follow several people as they try to cope with life on the edge. Each chapter [...]
Posted in writing, tagged the writing life on 27 February 2008 | 1 Comment »
Here’s Eileen Gunn, in her book Stable Strategies and Others, quoting William Gibson on the secret of writing:
“You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.”
When I read that sentence I was stunned. It was like he was talking to me because what I have had to overcome is [...]
Posted in writing, tagged cool stuff, the writing life on 22 February 2008 | 4 Comments »
If you haven’t seen “Shelf Life” by Adrian Tomine, the hilarious cover of the current New Yorker, it’s worth seeking out. There’s a teeny tiny version of it on this page and a bigger version on the artist’s website here (currently the 4th box in the top row). It depicts the book publishing process in [...]
Posted in writing, tagged list, the writing life on 13 February 2008 | 4 Comments »
They say there are two things you should never see being made: sausage and laws. I think novel writing might be another. My first drafts are always remarkably unattractive objects. Making it right is all in the rewriting, of course. When I revise a first draft, one of the first things I do is get [...]
Posted in writing, tagged notebook, the writing life on 11 February 2008 | 2 Comments »
Like many writers I have a notebook that I carry around for recording observations, quotes, scenes, thoughts, snippets of dialog, attempts at poems, and some of the crazy ideas I get that might someday be the impetus for a writing project. It’s an analog device with two components: a school composition book with sewn binding [...]
Posted in writing, tagged shameless self promotion, the writing life on 10 February 2008 | 2 Comments »
When I was putting the finishing touches on my novel Terrastina and Mazolli I got a call from Nenad Dragicevic, the eminent European journalist and fabulist who I have admired for many years. He had somehow obtained a bootleg copy of T & M and enjoyed it so much that he wanted to talk to [...]
Posted in writing, tagged poetry, the writing life on 6 February 2008 | No Comments »
If you want to see someone’s eyes glaze over, ask them if they’d like to hear some of your poems. It’s an instant excuse generator. Not that I blame anyone for staying away from poetry readings. I usually avoid them myself because no matter how good the poet, I almost always find myself fuzzing out [...]
Posted in writing, tagged the writing life on 5 February 2008 | No Comments »
Kim and I have a deal going right now. We have both agreed to write at least one thousand words a day. We’re both working on novels at the moment and this daily quota really helps make the job less intimidating. A commercial length novel is many tens of thousands of words long. If you [...]
