Tools and Craft

The problem with traveling (other than the part where getting the husband to understand that, if he doesn’t make decisions, we cannot be responsible for the fact he can’t shave) is that you get into a news time warp. Truly, you’re under sedation. Yes, we’ve already lost our point. Luckily, through the magic of Firefox, we have found it again (have we mentioned tabbed browsing?). Yesterday, we posted about character, the author as character, and family (including friends, bosses, etc) as character. Is there a line, and who, pray tell, is going to define it? Not that we’re letting Meg […]

The idea of character versus reality has come up in many ways over the past few days. For example, today Ana Marie Cox, a keynote speaker at SXSW explained that Wonkette is a character (it was also revealed that she’s married…this was news only to Robert Scoble). If you’re a fiction writer, this makes perfect sense. After all, our nearest and dearest know that we don’t know everything; we cannot, for example, convert miles to kilometers. Character, or rather how you present yourself in various situations, has threaded through the SXSW sessions (note: in our defense, we have not attended

We suppose we must begin with a question: has there ever been a point in publishing history where every book released into the wild came accompanied by an unlimited promotion budget? We ask because we are not certain if the large number of books being released truly means that authors need to be more creative with marketing, or if authors have always been required to exercise ingenuity and guile. Marketing is our biggest fear. It goes back to kindergarten and playing the fat lady in the school circus. This was before the point in our life when we discovered food

You’d think that people would keep excellent track of their money. But they don’t. While we cannot give away trade secrets, we recently encountered a situation where two well-known (in a different era) producers had their checks returned because they’d either a) died or b) moved without a forwarding address. This, sad to say, is not outside our normal experience. Thus, in the spirit of public service and all that, we bring you a listing of authors and works due money…yet nobody has claimed the funds. Yes, yes, we know, it’s the Google era. You will have to take our

Back in the olden days, you had to work to figure out who represented your favorite author. So, so passe. So last century. So hard. Who has time for such nonsense — after all, why else were databases invented*? Still, the fine folks at Publisher’s Marketplace love to innovate, and now you can do all the detailed research you want without hitting the bookstore. Not that we’re discouraging visiting bookstores. * – The thought that databases were created to increase productivity has been proven false; the rise of the database directly correlates with the increase of people spending hours scouring

In keeping with our discussion on reading, we bring you the concept of reading as it relates to writing. We have met very few writers who are not readers (and we have met more than a few writers who finally accepted their calling when they found nothing they wanted to read, and decided to write their own stories). Reading is as much a part of writing as pen, keyboard, paper, stamped, self-addressed envelopes…the article linked below explains it far better than we can, so we offer the thesis, picking up right after the author’s students confront an essay test where

The husband often tells us that someday we will have a wiki*. For a long time, we got away with pretending to confuse a useful tool with a frou-frou drink garnished with fruit and paper umbrellas. Our strategy was sound — we were testing the limits of his patience by making explain the same concept over and over and over. And over. It was about the time he declared that he couldn’t take it any more, he had to make an adjustment to the entry about the Pasadena parrots that we gave up the game. For the record, the entry

Oh sure, we meant to post this information earlier today. And, yes, we believe we have sufficient will to overcome the strongest lure of of the Web. This does not count active procrastination — that is more of a vocation, not an avoidance technique. We have met our match in the venerable New York Public Library. This is not the first time we have been vanquished by this particular foe, and we suspect it will not be the last. Hey, it beats losing face to, oh, Page Six. The NYPL has opened up its archives and placed, give or take,

Richard Curtis concludes (we believe) his series on Publishing in the 21st Century with a look at how computers have transformed the industry. Yes, children, it’s not just the fact that editors and agents are accepting submissions via email (and we do so appreciate those who do — though we may be less appreciative of those who reject via email). Curtis spends a lot of time focusing on blogs as the writers’ platform, and suggests that a good blog is an increasingly critical component of the publication process. He goes so far as to say: When traditional publishers talk about