Publicity is a perennial problem for writers – what to do, how to do it, what works, what doesn’t. I’ve had several queries on the subject in the past few weeks, so despite the fact that publicity is NOT one of my strong suits, I’m going to
Read more →How many stories have you written? 22 novels, one nonfiction book on writing, and a bunch of short stories (I lose track of the short fiction very easily). What was your first story written? Published? The first story I tried to write was a novel I started
Read more →Every character in every book has their own story, and each character is the hero of his or her own story. This piece of writing wisdom has been around for at least as long as the novel has, but too often, writers don’t think about the implications
Read more →I’m spending the weekend at the Sirens conference in Washington state. The best part about such conferences tends to be meeting other book people – writers, editors, agents, fans, booksellers. The second best part is talking books with book people, because there are always people with a
Read more →I’m on vacation this week with no Internet. Regular service should resume Sunday.
Read more →Years ago, I heard a story about — I think it was Lester Del Rey, but it may have been somebody else of that era of SF writers. He wanted to set a story in Africa, which he had never visited. So he researched it — watched
Read more →One of the fairly common writing metaphors draws a connection between writing a novel and taking a road trip. You see a lot of comments like “You don’t need to see the entire highway that leads from Chicago to Denver in order to drive to Denver; you
Read more →So, you have a story in which you have two characters in a scene, and each of them has information that you want your reader to know, and which you think (at least initially) that you can only let the reader know by being in that character’s
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