TANSTAAFL

As any devoted Heinlein fan knows, TANSTAAFL stands for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It’s one of those obvious truths about the world, like Murphy’s Law, that ought to go without saying, yet people seem to need to be reminded of it over

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Query Letters

A query letter is one page, asking the editor if he/she wants to see a submission of the book.  It includes some sort of very brief summary of the book (so the editor can get an idea whether it’s worth asking to see it), and there are

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Deciding to be a Writer

One of the questions I get asked a lot is “how did you decide to be a writer?” And the short answer is, I didn’t. Oh, I’ve been writing since I started my first (unfinished, unpublishable) novel in seventh grade, but it was always about writing, not

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Standing on your Head in the Shower

There is no bad way to write a story.  No editor cares how you wrote it.  No editor, to my knowledge, has ever rejected a story on the grounds that the author did not have a plan, character sketches, maps, or time lines before writing the story. 

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Next Step on the Way

Last Wednesday, I finished reviewing the copy-edit of Across the Great Barrier, which was my last chance to make any major changes to the book. I’ll get another look at it when the galleys/page proofs come, but barring some totally egregious error that’s slipped past every single

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