Friday treat: a new chapter of It’s All Just A Draft

February 26th 2010 at 3:41 pm

Another chapter of It’s All Just A Draft went up, this one is about hunting down markets (Published Writers Find Markets), it’s adapted from a blog post, a podcast, and an email, so it’s been ready to go for a while. The chapter on rejection has been done since forever, again, an easy adaption from [...]

Delaying gratification

February 24th 2010 at 2:33 pm

I have this thing I do, learned as a habit that helps me save money over time. I keep a list of cool things I want to buy.
Whenever I see something that prompts an ‘oh, cool, I’d like one of those’ reaction, I put it in my ‘things I want to buy list.’ That way, [...]

It’s All Just a Draft: update

February 23rd 2010 at 11:46 am

A few of you emailed, and one of you twittered, to ask if I was continuing ‘It’s All Just A Draft,’ the collection of all my blog posts into a quick summary of writing advice I’d given out here over the last 10 years.
I had the first few pieces of the project posted at a [...]

Podcasts are eligible for Hugos

February 23rd 2010 at 9:50 am

Tony at StarShipSofa wrote
Here’s the thing… podcasts have not been nominated for a Hugo yet…. but
they changed the wording in 2009 to “or the equivalent in other media” which
makes us eligible. Apparently we’ve always been eligible but now it’s wrote
in stone, so to speak.
There’s more info here about podcasts and Hugos.
And if you enjoy, say, [...]

New York Reading Appearance Tuesday, March 2nd

February 22nd 2010 at 8:46 am

On March 2nd, (which is a Tuesday, as an astute commenter noted, not a Monday as I first indicated) you can catch me in New York City reading at the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings. I’ll be reading along with the awesome L.A. Banks, and Joe Monti is the guest curator of this [...]

An exciting time to love literature

February 21st 2010 at 1:40 am

Jason Pinter thinks so, and I have to agree. It is an exciting time. Of course, that comes with turbulence, exciting times. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I just want to take a moment to proclaim that this is quite possibly the most exciting period to be a reader in my [...]

How to sign an eBook

February 14th 2010 at 8:59 am

One of the questions I get about reading on eBooks is how will authors personalize an eBook?
Well, I found that out last month, while at the Science Fiction convention called ‘Confusion’ near Detroit. Sarah Zettel had a copy of my novel Sly Mongoose on her Sony eReader, and she asked me to sign it.
She details [...]

Old pharts and new writers?

February 13th 2010 at 11:38 pm

Lois Tilton’s stirring the internets up a bit with this essay:
In these few years I have noticed a number of changes in the genre, and one in particular: a deep and growing gap between two sets of short fiction periodicals. To a certain extent, but not entirely, it is a gap dividing electronic from print [...]

The 3 types of knowledge

February 13th 2010 at 9:25 am

Steve Schwartz writes about the 3 kinds of knowledge out there.

To really understand how it is that no one knows what they’re doing, we need to understand the three fundamental categories of information.
There’s the shit you know, the shit you know you don’t know, and the shit you don’t know you don’t know.

Understanding [...]

Hey, Dumbass Dodge commercial dude, yeah you, come over here…

February 12th 2010 at 5:39 pm

Because I don’t have cable I missed that horrifically awful Dodge commercial (your auto bailout tax dollars at work!).
I will get up and walk the dog at 6:30 AM…
Well who’s fucking idea was that? Get a peepad, or get a big dog that can fucking hold it who learns your schedule. Or better yet, don’t [...]