Over the weekend the Nebula awards conference was successfully held online, via zoom and webpage. It was frankly, a tremendous success, and I’m proud I had the opportunity to volunteer and participate. It can be viewed as practically a case study in how to rapidly convert to an online convention experience with minimall paid staff … Read more
We have to live in the world, not in some ivory tower, and this exercise can be useful in thinking about what values you want to espouse and support as a writer. There are also marketing and publishing implications, and you get to play around with things like “branding”. Back in the day, you could … Read more
On December 10th, 2009, Red Letter Media published on Youtube a 7 part review of The Phantom Menace. It’s harsh, brutal even, and somewhat gross. There’s a sub-plot in the reviews about who the reviewer is that is quite dark, but it’s also a genius review. In fact, I would argue that this review of … Read more
Every day I try to write a very short story and post it under the hashtag #vss365. VSS365 was born out of Flash Dogs, a website which appears to no longer exist, but can be viewed on the Wayback machine, the specific entry for #VSS365 is here: Flash Dogs VSS 365 post. Each month a … Read more
You slave and slave: outlining, drafting, editing, rewriting, getting beta reads, re-writing, steeping, re-writing, and finally submitting. Some time passes. Maybe a lot of time passes. Maybe “time begins seriously to pass”. Finally, you (if you’re lucky) get a rejection. You feel rejected; you are dejected, you’re not respected, your work wasn’t elected. Even worse … Read more
Sometimes people self-publish a book on Amazon, and it seems like nothing happens. Nobody is really reading it, nobody is talking about it, nobody is reviewing it. Maybe you’ve done all the right steps, set up a website, promoting on social media, running a newsletter. Readers are not exactly subject to a paucity of choices. … Read more
For most of my life, I’ve wavered between wanting to be a writer and thinking of myself as a writer as I stumbled down the many twisty paths and alleyways of life. When I say “to be a writer” I mean something far more specific than simply someone who writes because we all write: notes, … Read more