I have met a great many people who claim they want to be writers, but who don’t act like it. I have also met more than one professional writer who claims to want to quit his/her day job and go full-time as a writer, but who doesn’t
Read more →One of the persistent pieces of advice given to new and would-be writers is “Don’t talk about your work until it’s finished!” Some folks get incredibly passionate about it, running on for pages in their how-to-write manuals and blogs, or shouting and waving their arms if they’re
Read more →Motivation, according to my trusty Oxford American Dictionary, is “that which induces a person to act a certain way.” I like that definition a lot better than some of the others I ran across, including “inspiration,” “the desire to do something,” and “enthusiasm,” among others. The reason
Read more →Next week, I’m leaving on a 2-1/2 week road trip with my father. It’s not really a vacation – I’m guest of honor at Conjecture in San Diego Oct 5-7 – but Dad and I decided to take the extra time to drive out from Chicago and
Read more →I’ve had house guests for the past five days (my cousin stayed with me; my Dad stayed with my sister), and in the process of doing all the show-the-out-of-town-family-around stuff, doing the blog got kind of behind. Which is why I’m late and a bit disconnected with
Read more →So this week has been crazy, yes, but it’s the last two days in particular that really did me in. Saturday in particular. It went something like this: Wednesday Me: Cazaril, that’s about six too many hairballs. I’m calling the carpet cleaners. Cazaril: Hmmm? Did you know
Read more →First off, I am pleased to say that the three Kate and Cecy books will be going live as e-books on May 22. Stephanie Burgis did a lovely blog post on them. Which means that all of the backlist except the Enchanted Forest books are now available
Read more →Ask a writer what it is they want to do with their story, and something like eight out of ten will start by giving you a description of the plot. Ask again, push a little harder, and 99% of them will eventually come up with “I want
Read more →It looks as if we have successfully migrated the blog and web site to the new servers, knock wood. I’m afraid a couple of comments got lost in the switchover, sorry. The whole process was a whole lot more involved than I’d expected, and I wasn’t even
Read more →So after all these business posts, people wanted me to write about retiring. I’m not surprised; it was kind of exhausting to think about doing all that stuff. In any case, this is the retirement-for-writers post. The very first question is: what does retirement mean to you,
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