So you have your FINISHED novel-length manuscript, and you’ve done some thinking about what you’d like your agent to do for you in addition to submissions, negotiations, and collecting from your publishers. Now it’s time to actually start looking for an agent. And the first thing you
Read more →So Julie D. asked: Could I put in a request for a post about finding the right agent as a first time author, and/or whether self-publishing electronically is a bad idea? It’s actually two questions, but I’m going to start with the question about agents. Actually, let’s
Read more →So the first draft of The Far West is done at last, turned in a bit over two weeks ago, and I’m past the first walking-around-in-a-daze bit where I spend all my time feeling as if I ought to be finishing the book and then remembering that
Read more →One of the things 4th Street Fantasy Con did this year was a workshop on writers’ support systems, which I participated in. I did a lot of thinking about the topic, and it occurred to me that most of my blog readers probably weren’t there and could
Read more →One of the supposed truisms of writing is that a good plot must have conflict. And while this is, in fact, true, I’ve seen it misinterpreted so many times that I thought I’d talk about it a little. The problem always seems to come in the definition
Read more →In the two years and a bit that I’ve been producing this blog, I’ve developed a rule of thumb that goes “Any time three people ask me more or less the same question in the same week, it’s probably time to do a post on the topic.”
Read more →Rather than do a normal sort of round-up of how wonderful last weekend’s Fourth Street Fantasy con was, I opted to collect an assortment of interesting comments heard and overheard during the course of the weekend. A few were made by panelists on actual panels; some were
Read more →On the very first day at Fourth Street Fantasy convention (which as of this posting, is still in session for another half-day or so), Elizabeth Bear mentioned running into a writing myth I’d never heard myself before: Women can’t ride stallions, because stallions get aggressive around women.
Read more →Alfred Hitchcock gave a famous definition of the difference between surprise and suspense. It boils down to this: If a bunch of guys are playing poker and suddenly a bomb goes off under the table, that’s a surprise. It’s not what the viewer expects. If, however, the
Read more →“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” – L.P. Hartley One of the tricky aspects of writing books set in any vaguely recognizable version of history is the inevitable clash between now and then, on pretty much every level. There are an enormous
Read more →
