My tax guy said I should create a business identity that the money will go to (if I ever sell a book) rather than just my name. I don’t know whether that means I have to sign the agent contract with my “business” name or not. Generally
Read more →We now reach the third leg of the professional-writing stool: Business. At first glance, this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the writing part of writing-as-a-profession. Business is all about the profession part, right? And logically, that means that writers who don’t care about “having
Read more →Craft, to me, is the skill part of writing, the part you can analyze and learn. It’s techniques, viewpoint, grammar, and style. It includes the mechanics of characterization, dialog, description, and action, as well as highly macro-level things like plot and pacing, worldbuilding, backstory, and characterization. It
Read more →Art is the first leg of the three-legged stool that is writing, and possibly the most difficult to talk about because it is abstract. All of the definitions I could find talk about expression, creativity, beauty, emotion, and imagination – all of which are ideas rather than
Read more →Writing fiction professionally is a three-legged stool. It’s an art. It’s a craft. It’s a business. Like all three-legged stools, it is most stable and comfortable when all three of the legs are the same length; that is, when each area receives an appropriate amount of attention.
Read more →Points of Departure is now for sale! As you can see, we have made the leap to a new host for the web site. There are still a few problems shaking out, so new posts may suffer from odd timing for a few weeks, but I am
Read more →Because this website is changing servers, there’s a possibility that this week’s blog post, scheduled for Wednesday, April 29, may be slightly delayed. Sincerely, The Management
Read more →Before I begin, let me just mention that Points of Departure, the anthology of Liavek stories Pamela Dean and I did, is going live on May 12, and we just got a very nice starred review http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-62681-555-1 at the Publisher’s Weekly website. This is a very big
Read more →A couple of years ago, I was at a seminar on getting organized (I am a sucker for that kind of thing), and the presenter asked for examples of our current projects-in-process. Naturally, the example I came up with was the book I was working on at
Read more →A few more words about plot before I move on to something else for a while: First off, dozens of people besides Heinlein have come up with different sets of basic plots; he’s not the last word on the subject. Most of them have a lot more
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