I’m going back to basics this week, focusing on my routine and getting back into the habit of getting shit done. This means being in bed by ten o’clock each night. It means getting by 6:15 every morning, making sure I’m at the keyboard and working before 7:00. It means easing back my words-per-day goal […]
I’m off to nurse my throat infection today, spending some quality time drinking tea and staying warm. With that in mind, I figured I’d throw out a grab-bag of recommended reading for writers from elsewhere on the internet. Two of the links below are on the list of things I wish every writer read before they started […]
Writers aren’t fond of the word no. It comes from a career that is built around rejection – we spend so much time getting told “no” by editors and agents that it just because natural to start saying yes to things for the sake of hearing the word. And while there are some phrases where […]
I first heard about Donald Maass and his five-books threshold for establishing an audience when I met Australian Fantasy and SF novelists Karen Miller, who’d spent the early years of her career powering through a pretty impressive number of novels back-to-back in order to establish an audience as quickly as possible. The results were impressive: […]
Last Friday I went out to do a presentation at a local school, talking to kids aged ten to seventeen about becoming a science-fiction and fantasy writer. I’m not usually the guy who gets asked to talk to school-age writers, as evidenced by the notes at the top of my presentation – don’t swear, and […]
Last year I picked up a copy of Nick Cave: Sinner Saint: The True Confessions, Thirty Years of Essential Interviews. Partially this is ‘cause I’m a fan of Cave’s work, from the freewheeling chaos of the Birthday Party through to his more recent albums with both The Bad Seeds and Grinderman. Partially it was ’cause […]
So, here’s the thing: I spend the vast majority of my daylight hours talking to aspiring writers about what they’d like to achieve and how they can get there. This is one of the things that comes with the territory when you work at a place like Queensland Writers Centre, and it’s pretty sweet gig. […]
Thou shalt network, people used to tell me. Connections are how you get ahead in any business. And me, I’d ignore them. Hell, I was all fuck that shit. Networking brought to mind visions of trading business cards and ruthlessly finding people to help you getting ahead that seemed…well, exceedingly eighties. Right up there with giant shoulder-pads […]
You don’t want to be published. And, yes, I know you disagree. You’re an aspiring writer. You’ve worked hard at your craft. You’ve been getting rejection letter after rejection letter since you started sending your work out. All you want, more than anything in the world, is to get published. It’s the focus of everything […]
So the announcement on the Apocalypse Ink blog has made it all official: I’ve got me a book dropping on July 14th. That’s July 14th on the American West Coast, though, which means it’ll be July 15th for those of us here in Australia. Blame the international time zones at work. What this means is […]
Five years ago, more or less, I was having coffee with my friend Angela Slatter and listening to her complain about the slow progress she was making on her latest draft. Shoot, I said, there’s an easy fix for that. At Clarion Kelly Link mentioned she and Holly Black get together in a coffee shop once […]
I’m often fascinated by the psychology behind the way we do things, usually because there are all sorts of parallels between other things and writing. Case in point: I was recently pointed towards Gretchen Reynold’s article about exercise while perusing Lifehacker, and was immediately struck by the similarities between the way she talked about regular […]
