• Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Fantastic Writing Advice

    “Write like everyone you know is dead…” Joe Lansdale said that in the post that he allowed me to copy here last night. And I wanted to point out that one simple things he says. Here is what he said on the topic in total: “Write like everyone you know is dead. To hell with everyone else’s opinion when you write. Write for yourself. I don’t have a perfect reader in mind. That works for some, but it makes me write for them which means I might not be writing for me. I have no idea what anyone else will like. I only know what I like, so I write…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Because of Last Night’s Comments

    I Did a Tip of the Week… On how and why bestselling authors give bad advice to young writers. So in a very quick post here, I thought I would list a few reasons that come to me off the top of my head. 1… It was how the bestseller learned in the last century, so beginning writers should learn the same way, even though that is not how the bestselling writer actually works now. 2… It seems like a good way to train beginning writers (like the no adverb silliness). 3… The author is not talking to other authors, but to readers. (Writing as work and rewrite myth comes…

  • On Writing,  publishing

    The New World of Publishing: How to Get Started Selling in 2014

    In the old days, meaning more than four years ago, the path to becoming a professional fiction writer was pretty simple to understand. You wrote stories and novels and mailed them to traditional publishers directly. When the story was rejected, you kept the story (or novel) in the mail until someone bought it.  Well, not so much anymore. Fiction writers now have that dreaded word: Choice. And so, the path to being a successful fiction writer isn’t so clear anymore. In fact, I would call it downright muddy. So I’m going to update this article that I did last year because there are so many people coming to this place…