So I just finished the page proofs for How to Run Your Evil Empire, which has me thinking about the differences between writing the first draft, revising it, and polishing it. For those of you who haven’t discovered Elle Cordova yet, this video sums that part up
Read more →Having lost the past week to the Anthropic mess, I am going to indulge myself in a minor rant. Bear in mind that I am neither a lawyer nor a computer programmer, and there are much broader issues than just the ones that affect published writers. For
Read more →If you want to make a living in the arts, there are always two things you have to worry about: how to create the best art you can (whether it’s a physical product like a book or painting, or something more ephemeral like a live performance), and
Read more →From the outside, publishing used to look a bit like an enormous skyscraper, maybe shaped a bit like a pyramid, with a tiny top poking out of the clouds above and a row of doors at the bottom with the names of editors and agents written on
Read more →Open Mike Question: How do you deal with the waiting period after you submit to agents? I just finished my first book and sent it out to a handful of agents, and I can’t help thinking about it and waiting and wondering all the time, but there’s
Read more →One of the most difficult things I have to do, as a novelist, is to come up with a short version of the book. This is, in large part, because I am a novelist—I have a hard time saying anything in less than 80,000 words—but that’s not
Read more →One of the things it’s easy to lose sight of is that “writing is a solitary business” has a lot of implications besides “it means you spend a lot of time sitting alone at your computer writing stuff.” Among other things, it means that everything comes down
Read more →Mary Kuhner asked: When you’re writing a short intro for a query letter, how far into the plot do you normally go? It depends on the book and what the submission directions say. What the particular publisher says in their submission directions always trumps any and every
Read more →Would-be writers often go looking for help. Most turn to free online advice and/or groups like the NaNoWriMo community, look for people who will beta-read their work, or hunt up other writers to form a critique group (this last has gotten a lot easier with the rise
Read more →There are some questions that all writers get, over and over and over. Anything that is repeated that many times gets very old, very fast. One of the most irritatingly common questions is the perennial “Where do you get your ideas?” But even more irritating are the
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