Tools and Craft

So, yes, we’re moving on, but had just one more thought. Sure, we could have caught Tom Dolby’s Virtual Book Tour last week. If we didn’t have an evil overlord named Kevin and cats who demand only the finest in Friskies and a novel by a dear friend to critique. That’s the problem with free time, you need it to enjoy it. By free time, we mean procrastination. So we’re catching up, and deciding we’re completely over the topic (until the next time we get worked up about it). Except for links to two additional posts. One is an interesting […]

The rain has stopped, the cats are reacquainting themselves with something called “sun”, and the day promises to be glorious. Yes, that means we’re headed out to Culver City to spend the day locked in a building. There are so many things wrong with this, we cannot begin to list them. Okay, we can, but it’s polite to shower before meetings, and we are nothing if not polite. So, if you haven’t heard about Virtual Book Tours, we can assure this: they will be all the rage sooner than you think. MJ Rose gets to the bottom of the concept

There is much grumbling from authors about advances. Generally, it is agreed that the amounts given aren’t big enough. When it comes to advances, one thing many authors neglect to consider is that the map is not the territory. Publishers calculate advances based on a variety of criteria, including anticipated revenue, but, at the end of the day, the success of a book is determined by what it earns. The way things work is that publishers take a lot of risk upfront on each book. They pay an advance against future earnings to the author, they pay to edit, they

It is rare that we look to Roger Ebert for insight on character development, but perhaps that is just our shortsightedness at work. After all, he did write one of the husband’s favorite movies of all time. Characters (as we all know) march to their own little drummers. How often do we find something happening on the page that isn’t what we’d do in real life*? It is this unexpected quality that makes characters fascinating. In fact, when a character’s actions challenges an author’s belief system, we think it adds unexpected depth to the story. Ebert looks further to point

Sometimes it seems hard to believe that today’s young writers are following the same vocation as that depicted by a long night of wakefulness in Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise (1938), when the tortured would-be writer lies awake all night hearing the bells sound off the hours – or is it the decades? – and all too soon eight o’clock approaches, and the magnum opus is still not written. Of all the afflictions of the old school, surely the most entrenched and significant was procrastination. Anyone can procrastinate, of course – anyone with a tendency to perfectionism and a horror

They say that novel writing is a lonely business and all that — well, yeah, if we wanted to make it a party, we’d probably go into advertising or screenwriting or something. However, there are times when you want to write with someone else. The good news is that collaborative software has come a long way. The bad news is it’s for the Mac only (this is a problem for us as we’re multi-systemal). We’ve used SubEthaEdit for brainstorming first drafts of business documents with the husband — it provides an opportunity to correct spelling and deleting his ideas in

Or maybe Los Angeles is one of the more terrifying towns. We often get this stuff mixed up. J-Fly (who’s un-on hiatus, and if we’d been playing more and working less, we’d know this) has decided to try a novel writing class at UCLA. We’ve done that, right down to the unfortunate runny nose (our conveniently timed allergy attack had a nice woman in a striped dress moving her desk away inch-by-inch. She never returned to class.). Based on our research, there are a few types who take these classes: earnest souls who really, really want to be published writers

We don’t often talk about books we’ve read (mostly because there are others who do such talking far more eloquently), but there was something curious in the last two books we read. Both featured a large cast of characters, all of whom were named. Except one. In both books, one character, the same character, was not given the dignity of a name, a persona. It was peculiar: two nameless husbands in a row. In both cases, the marriages were bad, but throughout both books, so were countless other relationships. It was unclear why these husbands were treated so cavalierly —

While we cannot advocate the concept of getting organized (what next, a clean refrigerator?), we are as susceptible as the next person to media overload. Lately, we can’t pick up so much as a novel without someone suggesting that clearing clutter will help focus our mind. The brainwashing is working — yesterday, we looked at the bottom of our purse and thought, “Gee, we should maybe throw away some of those old Trader Joe’s receipts.” Never fear, we stopped that thought. Maybe you wear clean underwear in case of an accident; we keep old receipts so posterity knows we shopped

If you’re looking for a few craft classes to meet one or more New Year’s resolutions, Salon has helpfully come through for you. Choose from a variety of options (satire, chicklit, screenwriting), and start your year off write! Yes, too much coffee. We promise, that will hardly happen again. Salon eClasses