These days, a career in writing has innumerable options. Even if you limit yourself to fiction, there’s screenwriting, playwriting, comics and graphic novels, short fiction, novels, and that’s all before you even get to the Internet and ebook side of things. And it’s not just a matter of deciding for yourself
Read more →There are several reasons why, for the last two posts, I have been using terms like “planning” and “pre-writing” and “notes” more often than “outline.” The main one is that the outline that the writer sends to an editor as part of a proposal is a very
Read more →You are standing in a hallway at nine in the morning, facing a dining room/kitchen to the south. To the west are stairs up. To the north is an office. Your head feels rather fuzzy. >Go north You are standing in a cluttered office, full of paper,
Read more →One of the first decisions writers have to make, once they’ve actually sold a manuscript, is what name to write under. There are a lot of possible considerations here, so let’s start with your actual name. My current full name is Patricia Collins Wrede; I could have
Read more →I have officially been in the book business since the late 70s, when I started work in the finance department at B. Daltons; I’ve been selling my writing since 1980, when Ace books bought my first novel, Shadow Magic. So that’s a bit more than thirty-three years,
Read more →OK, the RSS feed is not working; I am also having trouble importing paragraph breaks in the new blog. So this is going on the old blog and we’ll work on fixing the new one when my webmaster gets back next week. One of the things most
Read more →Back in my very young and salad days, when I was around 15-16, the original Star Trek series was the hot new thing on TV and my parents took me to see Leonard Nimoy in a summer-season play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. After the play,
Read more →This week, my walking buddy told me about an incident involving a mutual friend, who is a major tech consultant-type. Seems some gentleman who wanted advice on his algorithm offered to pay for two hours of critique/consulting time at a not-unreasonable-but-on-the-low-side rate. So the consultant-type agreed, took a look
Read more →A while back, I had a frustrating conversation with a guy who claimed to want to write. I’d hoped for better, given his email (which was why I agreed to meet him in the first place), but…well. So here are some of the things he did right, and a
Read more →“So how can you stand being edited?” is a question that’s been coming up at conventions lately. The subtext usually assumes that all editors are a) idiots and/or b) out to ruin everyone’s brilliant manuscripts, and that they must therefore be fought off with every bit of
Read more →
