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I’ve been sticking my thumb in Harlan Ellison’s eye. In recent months, I’ve been writing for public consumption without getting paid for it. This is exactly the sort of activity about which Harlan has raged in the past, and I agree with him; if a writer is producing work worth reading, it has value, and that [...] “Write what you know” has always been one of those nuggets of writing advice I tend to avoid. I can see the wisdom in writing what you know if you’re an expert on a popular topic. Otherwise, I think it’s much more interesting to write what you want to know. Writers tend to be curious [...] Early last month I had the agonizing good fortune of cracking open a notebook from the mid-1990s. In one section I’d spent several months following some advice whose source I’ve since forgotten: keeping a log of daily writing progress. One day per line, bonehead-simple entries: date, project(s), page numbers, tally. Cue reaction, January 2010: Holy hell! Look [...] As I’ve hinted in recent UNPLUGGEDs, I have been encountering difficulties in writing fiction. I fear I’ve discovered the reason. If the Prime Rule of Writing is WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW, then I cannot write contemporary fiction because I do not know … contemporary. For a time, I thought I was keeping up. I was able [...] Last week, I finished the first draft of The Goblin Emperor (::wild cheers::), and in the last five to ten thousand words or so, I gained a new appreciation for why mystery writers so frequently resort to the last chapter In Which The Great Detective Explains It All. And so today I’m going to talk [...] Over the President’s Day weekend I will be teaching at the Southern California Writers Conference. Because I am no stranger to this conference, its director rarely consults with me regarding what courses I will be teaching. This week I learned that one of my classes is, “Russell’s Rules to Publishing Success.” Given a choice, I wouldn’t [...] Hate is a relatively simple emotion. Stupid, but simple. Oh, people can cook up extensive mythologies to fuel the engine of hatred. And the mechanism itself can be elaborate – really, pick any brutal, self-destructive regime, past or present, and sift a while through the careful orchestration of grandiosity and paranoia. That’s not intelligence. No [...] Author Sidney Williams enjoys cooking with his wife, Christine. You never know when a good opportunity will come your way. Case in point: a few year’s ago, I inherited a box of vintage aprons. “These could be handy,” I thought, as I unfolded the polka dotted one on top and tied it around my waist. [...] I started a novel back at the beginning of November. I wrote well beyond the required fifty thousand words required for Nanowrimo and the annual challenge, and sometime in January, I finished. The book came in between 80,000 and 90,000 words. I immediately set it aside. I don’t know how many know or remember, but [...] |
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