Someone asked me how I write mysteries. Now that I’m writing them, it seems kind of like a “well, duh” question, although I recognize that they can seem intimidating from the outside, because I, too, was intimidated before I started writing them. Mostly, mostly, you write a mystery like you write anything else, however you happen […]
I recently saw what looks like good advice: “Write what you buy.” So I looked at the books that I buy. I buy: Alternate history. Literary historical fiction. Fantasy, especially grimdark. But also Terry Pratchett. Classic mysteries. Literary horror. Diverse authors. Smartass romance. James Bond novels. Pulp SF and pulp crime. Short stories!!! Some days,
This morning is not the world’s greatest morning for a packaged sound bite about writing. The World Fantasy Awards have been released and nothing that I read and liked won. There’s a new conflict about how to handle serial sexual harassers in an entertainment industry adjacent to mine–everyone agrees that they should be handled, but
I woke up last night out of a nightmare due to the fact that I don’t have a list of tasks longer than my arm to accomplish STAT, only things that I really ought to get to sooner rather than later, and I was worried that I missed something vital. In the dream, my teeth
I think a possible (possible!) hallmark of whether you’re on the right trail of selling your crap is the feeling that you have a magic wand. You wave it, and stuff happens–books sell. Maybe not as many books as you want to sell, and maybe you wave the wand again and the books stop selling.
Personally, I think if you’re going to end a horror story on an “everybody dies” note, it has to be because the characters chose it that way OR out of irony when they do everything right but it still doesn’t work, not because they oopsed into failure. If the situation was always hopeless, there never
NaNoWriMo is going on for some people. I’m not doing it this year. I’m not feeling it, I have too much other stuff going on, and I just did the writing-thing-per-day challenge thing last month, with the October flash fiction.* But here is my 2017 advice for surviving writing 50K in a month: You do
Step one of selling your crap (not that it’s crap, just that you’re likely to think it must be crap when you’re trying to sell it) is to go from “I’m going to pressure my connections into buying this based on who I am” to “Tempting, isn’t it?” So: identify three things that your audience
Most people hate most surprises most of the time. It’s only when you secretly suspect that there’s going to be a surprise, and the surprise will be exactly what you wanted but didn’t have to ask for, or what you would have wanted if you had known that it was a possibility, that a “surprise” is
The whole collection is live! Oct 31: TRICK OR TREAT It is a thousand years from now. Whenever now is, it’s a thousand years after that. A cure for mortality has been created—crafted—perfected. Humanity has moved to the stars. Why not? We have literally nothing better to do than to explore the
