Archive for the 'On Writing' Category
Quote of the Day
July 4th 2008 at 3:57 pm
2. Ever repeat a word so much it starts to lose its meaning? Writing a book is like that, only with 90,000 words.
Jim Hines, July 3rd, 2008, on his blog.
I like this so much I’m stealing it. Attribution will come, Jim, yes, but this enters into my lexicon of clever things to say about writing.
Indy publishers versus big hourses
May 30th 2008 at 9:23 am
My friend Mark Terry looks at the differences between smaller presses and big houses:
Are small presses more willing to take a chance on something unique?
The assumption being that the reason you’re being turned down by larger publishers is that you’re too “unique,” but I don’t know. That seems to be the rumor, but I reviewed […]
A pamphlet on writing?
May 13th 2008 at 12:28 pm
I’ve been noticing that my most popular blog entries are writing advice related, and I’ve been blathering away here for, well, years. While watching TV of late I’ve been browsing my archives during commercials and copy/pasting any interesting nuggets into a file to collate and capture all the thoughts and writing advice into one big […]
Idea generation
May 9th 2008 at 6:27 am
In the ask me a question comment thread SMD asks:
What are some ways you come up with ideas for stories either for shorts or novels? (I don’t mean specifically…but if you go to certain websites or read certain blogs that give you sparks of ideas, or something, I’d like to know).
I read history books, science […]
Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing
May 2nd 2008 at 2:21 pm
The latest podcast of Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing is up, it includes me talking about how to start writing again after a long period of downtime.
Also on the show, an interview with David Keck, and Lou Anders talks about whether short fiction is dead or not.
Mark Terry on advances
May 2nd 2008 at 8:39 am
Mark Terry opens up and talks details about advances at his blog (bookmarked from back before I was sick).
Kindle is back
May 1st 2008 at 4:52 pm
Amazon is still not releasing actual Kindle numbers, but they are restocked and I see that most customers really like them on the Kindle page. For someone who reads as much as me, it is tempting, with one caveat:
I do most of my reading at night. The reason I like e-books is for backlit reading […]
Publishing timelines
May 1st 2008 at 1:48 pm
Chris Howard, new author, is looking for other authors to contribute their publishing timelines so he can make up a chart of what a novel goes through and how long it takes and posts a graph for his first novel.
The thing is, I think it changes from book to book, house to house. But I’ll […]
Dichotomous Crystal Rain reviews
April 22nd 2008 at 8:01 am
This reader, not so much a fan.
Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain is a shining example of why the Golden Age of Science Fiction is over…
The writing is readable, but not great. After all, real men do not indulge in developing characters, or even in having emotions. Every character is entirely wooden, but of course our heroes […]
Penguicon 2008 con report
April 21st 2008 at 3:35 pm
Penguicon is a Detroit area Linux/Open Source/Science Fiction convention (naturally) which is a lot of fun. They invited me up the past couple years, this year I didn’t get an invite so that meant, being disorganized as I am, I didn’t realize the con was happening until a week before.
Jim Hall, the host of Cult […]
