We used to sell books by telling you how exceptional the story was. The whole back cover synopsis pushing you to invest in the character journey and atmosphere of the story contained within. Selling you on the author was a secondary concern, because the author was an invisible presence nine times out of ten. Your […]
One of the recurring refrains in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative is the importance of unnecessary creating or back-burner creating. The creative work that you do that’s not on spec or on demand, but something that’s done because you’re curious, refining new skills, or simply interested in the subject. My accidental creating often revolves pro-wrestling, […]
As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m attempting to publish 52 chapbooks throughout 2022. You can read a little more about it here. Today, let’s talk a little about the first cab off the rank: Available in ebook from all great bookstores right now and in print next week, but you can get it as a […]
Back at the tail end of 2020, Dean Wesley Smith laid out a challenge to aspiring indie writers who had a short story back list: publish 52 short stories over 2021. One of the key details in his write-up is that the focus is publishing rather than writing. As he put it: A lot of […]
Back when I taught short story writing, people would often ask the trick for getting past the inevitable flow or rejections. My answer was always simple: it comes down to volume. When you have a single short story that you’re sending out, every rejection feels like you’ve been thwarted. When you’re sending out a dozen […]
Back when I pulled together the Brain Jar Press writer guidelines, I specifically called out that we use a backlist driven model of publishing. It’s one of those phrases that generates a lot of questions from new authors, and there’s been a project where the author in question wasn’t interested in pursuing publication with us […]
My favourite headline doing the rounds right now: Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel? It seems to originate from Julian Novitz’s article over on The Conversation, taking a quick dive into Rushdie’s decision to publish his new novella through Substack on a Pro deal (where Substack pays creators […]
I’ve got a long history of advising writers to clarify their goals and vision around writing, and a recurring question is often how? It’s too big a question to tackle in blog posts, but something that occasionally gets some clarity during the longer, face-to-face (or email-to-email) conversations that take place with friends. One insight is […]
’m sufficiently old that I feel like the window for talking about We Are Lady Parts is over, what with the series coming out in May of 2021 and our engagement with it taking place in early September. I’m old because I’m trapped in a cultural paradigm where immediacy is a primary virtue when recommending […]
There are projects that feel like you’ve captured lightning in a bottle, and they’re only partially fueled by talent. The biggest story in professional wrestling right now is the return of CM Punk. A man who walks down to the ring to talk, and gets a standing ovation from ten thousand fans that lasts through […]
Two questions worth asking at the start of every writing project, from tweet to blog post to short story to novel. Question One: What is the most useful or interesting idea I can put into the world today? Question Two: Am I picking the right fight with this piece? “But Peter,” I hear you argue, […]
I spend a lot of time fascinated by the mutability of words, which is one of those things that’s seeped into my fiction from time-to-time. This made me a sucker for Something Something Soup Something, a concept that’s part-online game and part philosophy experiment about the mutability of a simple concept like “soup”. The narrative behind the […]
