I suspect that I shouldn’t have been surprised when my request for blog topics netted several about my process and career, but I was. The first one I’m going to deal with was about letting projects “ferment” and its implied negative effect on productivity and the writer’s
Read more →I feel like I keep coming in fourth at the Olympics. – Tiana Smith Trying to break into publishing is a time-consuming and deeply discouraging process. It always has been. There is little that can make someone feel as unappreciated and untalented as a string of form
Read more →Thank you all for your input; I’ll try to get around to everyone’s suggestions in the relatively near future. I’m going to start with a post about getting stuck, because the first two suggestions were both aspects of that and I haven’t written about it for a
Read more →For those who don’t know, I live in Minnesota. The weather here is a perennial topic; the news reports the temperature every hour on the hour, and every fifteen minutes (it seems like) when it’s particularly unusual. People talk about the weather constantly. Yesterday, I overheard at
Read more →Listening to NPR the day after Thanksgiving, I heard a story about an archive of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s manuscripts. “They are covered with handwritten corrections!” the archivist enthused, to which the interviewer responded, “The idea that he corrected himself just blows me away.” Which response rather blew
Read more →I drove down to Chicago yesterday with my father, and I let him pick the route. Instead of taking the freeway through Wisconsin, which I have done many times and which takes about 7 hours plus meal and gas stops, we drove down the west bank of
Read more →“If you’re having trouble with your ending, look at your beginning.” – Anonymous One of the most important elements of a story is a satisfying ending, and a satisfying ending almost always involves closure. You see it in the terminology we use to talk about the structure
Read more →Characters are fundamental to nearly all stories. Whatever happens, happens to somebody or is made to happen by somebody, or both. Even when the characters in a story are not human, as in Watership Down, they tend to be anthropomophized. Most readers remember appealing and interesting characters
Read more →If you or anyone you know is at all serious about a sport, running, or exercise, you’re probably familiar with the concept of cross-training. The idea is that you improve faster and are more likely to avoid injury if you do more than one type of exercise
Read more →The simplest and easiest way to publicize your novel, whether self-published or traditional, is on the Internet. Everybody knows that, and everybody is doing it. When I said I was posting a series on publicity, I got specific recommendations from every single person I mentioned it to,
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