I woke up at 3 a.m. yesterday to a panic attack. Adrenaline coursed through my body; it was like a jolt of juice in the arm, a desperate desire to fight or flee flooding me from head to toe, compelling me to move, to act. I sat in bed for some time, heart racing, talking […]
Nobody’s Normal: Introversion and the Writing Life Read More »
There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the publishing industry these days, the biggest doom and gloom of all being from midlist writers who used to be able to make a decent living wage on a book or a book and a half a year who find that, at best, they can pull in
Hacking the Writing Life: On Being a Writer With Three Jobs Read More »
I generally prefer to stick to positive imagery and commentary here, and I may eventually delete this post, but I keep seeing these lists of “vintage” sexist ads from the 50’s,60’s, and 70’s shared online so that folks may gloat about how “enlightened” we are in “this day and age.” I work in marketing and
You Don’t Have to Be Evil to Sell Things: A Primer on Ad Writing & Sexism Read More »
I was sitting around with some folks at my day job, waiting for another colleague to arrive for a meeting, when someone asked me how my vacation had been. “Oh, the usual,” I said. “I had book deadlines.” This turned into a discussion about the trials of publishing, book covers, and author control over payments
Blood from Stone: Finding Joy When Writing Becomes Work Read More »
In the first grade (3rd grade? whatever), my best friend ran for some student office, a rather innocuous one, I believe, like Treasurer or something like that. Treasurer was – I knew, even then – a good bet. He was an exceptionally gifted kid: smart, funny, brilliant; played violin and piano, read chapter books to
On Writing the Good Fight: Hugo Roundup Read More »
When you’re told that all of your friends are out riding Falcor the Luck Dragon to Disneyworld, where they will stay in Cinderella’s Castle and eat bon-bons all day while getting escorted to the front of every line via air-conditioned pumpkin carriage, it’s really, really hard not to go with them, even though you know Florida is
Why I’m Not Writing YA (though I often wish I was) Read More »
It’s perhaps not a huge secret that the last couple of years have been rough for me on the writing front. Writing careers are sticky things. They move slowly. Ever….so… slowly. For an impatient Twitter addict like me, the slow crawl of writing a book – let alone publishing one – can be agonizing, and
The Writing Life Readers Don’t See Read More »
Which is why things have been so quiet here. I was gunning to be done with the huge revised monster and sending it off to my agent before heading out for my trip this week, but that hasn’t happened. All I can say to everybody is, I think the wait will be worth it. Until
Yes, I’m Writing a Book… Read More »
If you haven’t read this article about Survivorship Bias (via Toby Buckell), and our tendency to give more weight to successes than failures, go read it. I’ll wait. Done? Survivorship bias plays into all sorts of things. In fact, it has a great deal to do with how we teach history, too, which I touched
Survivorship Bias and Writing Better Books (with Bonus Marketing Chat) Read More »
I recently read this piece by Judith Tarr reflecting on how the publishing world has changed since the 1980s, when writing a book a year was nice, but don’t let a publisher know you can write faster than that…. I’m often gobsmacked by how much my peers churn out every year. It’s an astonishing output,
Thoughts on the Writing Grind Read More »