I’ve spent the past month working on two projects and one involves research, so finding time to write online has been difficult at best. The last time I had a minute to post here, I decided instead to post a story to someone else’s website – one of those human-interest things where a lot of people share their experiences, etc. etc. I thought that it might be a decent sort of writing exercise and that I might try my hand at humor writing. It was a grave error, and one which came with a lesson I should have learned long ago.
Archive for the ‘on being an author....’ Category
Sorrows of modern storytelling
Sunday, August 29th, 2010Tags: bards, opinions, rudeness
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Book Dedications, and Bad Ideas
Friday, June 11th, 2010It’s another topic that fits under “Advice you Probably don’t need” and “on being an author” – I might have to make that its own category if this keeps happening. I’ve got a thing worth saying, but (for reasons I hope become clear) I’m going to have to be a little vague. Bear with me, and please don’t contact me demanding to know the author or dedicatee in question (again, for reasons I hope become clear). Last night, I pulled a book from my “to read” stash and, though I usually don’t pay strict attention to the dedication page, that happened to be where I opened it to. The author had dedicated the book to a contemporary (and, as it turns out, controversial) politician. I had wanted to read the book but found myself selecting another for myriad complex reasons. Not because of the controversial, contemporary politician… but because I thought the dedication itself was short-sighted, ill-advised, and a plain dumb thing to have done.
Tags: controversy, fiction, politicians
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The Power of Place
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010I decided to post this under ”Advice You Probably Don’t Need” and “on being an author” because it fits both descriptions. It’s advice, on being an author, that you probably don’t need. It’s also something of a confessional. Here it is: I’m lazy, easily distracted, and easily won over by my own gimmicky ideas. (Can I get a support group started for that?)
Tags: coffeeshops, nickels, writing
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What separates heroes from common folk (like you and I)
Friday, April 23rd, 2010Sci-fi fans will (or at least should) recognize the title – and I hope now “The Hero of Canton” will be stuck in my readers’ heads for the rest of the day. I was complaining to a fellow writer the other day about the difficulty in crafting heroic main characters. In the most traditional sense of the word (or so I thought), a hero was brave, strong (and gallant), possessed of great physical and/or moral strength, never wrong, never afraid, and always capable of solving any problem, any where, any time. But, to my wonderment, there’s other schools of thought.
Tags: George Lucas, heroes, Jayne Cobb, writing
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Defining “Published”
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010I don’t know if other writers read my blog… and as a freelancer, I take Mur Lafferty’s advice of “don’t be an ass” quite seriously. She’s right to advocate tact. But I think in the world of grown-up endeavors, we sometimes have to be honest about our assessments and opinions. I’m going to try to do that… with tact.
Tags: Michael Stackpole, Mur Lafferty, Samhain Publishing, self-published, vanity press
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