Character Building

This is from the blog Lying for a Living, published by one of my favorite up and coming crime novelists, Meg Gardiner. She has a humorous matter of fact no-nonsense approach on many subjects. On these posts she describes Character Building she did for her newest book, The Dirty Secrets Club and how she did [...]

Q&A With Novelist Elmore Leonard

Advice from a master at page turners: Keep it simple
By Rick Newman
U.S. News article
Elmore Leonard’s 42nd book is his shortest, by far. And that’s the point. After penning numerous page turners later adapted for the screen, like Three-Ten to Yuma, Rum Punch, Get Shorty, and Be Cool, Leonard gave a speech in which he listed [...]

The Worst Book Proposals

This article from Writer’s Weekly provides portions of actual book proposals as they were written. They are at once funny, but also have you wondering how delusional some people are.
By Angela Hoy
I’m pretty backed up this week so I’m going to share another installment of our popular column, World’s Worst Book Proposals. Yes, these are [...]

Great Advice for New SFF Novelists

Cool Blog: DeepGenre.com has a great article for newbie SFF novelists on what it takes to make a career out of writing Science Fiction & Fantasy novels. The true key to it all? Love what you do.

Using Real People/Places in Fiction

Writer’s Weekly answers a reader’s question in Ask The Expertabout using real people, places or events in their novel. There are things to watch out for to avoid pitfalls, but there may also be a hidden benefit.
In the Success Stories section is an article about how an admitted introvert makes her living as a [...]

First Time Seeing Stephen King in Person

My brother-in-law and I showed up at the Harvard Book Store around 6:00 PM to pick up our tickets and complimentary copy of ‘The Best American Short Stories 2007’, only to find they already moved them to the First Parish Church Meetinghouse in the Harvard campus.
We went over and waited on a not too [...]

Authors Find an Audience in Podcasts

Cool Story: This is a New York Times article from earlier this year on how some authors have turned to serializing their books into podcasts to gain an audience and jump start their writing career. The article is below, but if the link still works use it as there are other links in the side [...]

A Great Resource for Outlining

Cool Resource: If you’ve ever read Karen Wiesner’s “First Draft In 30 Days”, you know this is a great book to help you outline and prepare your novel – making it easy to flesh it out into a full length manuscript.
If you haven’t read it and are a writer that prefers to outline then [...]

A Real HORROR Writer

This is one writer who took his research just way too far.
From CNN
MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) — An aspiring horror novelist was arrested after police discovered his girlfriend’s torso in his closet, a leg in the refrigerator and bones in a cereal box, the city prosecutor’s spokesman said Thursday.
Nearby they found the draft of a [...]

The Problem with POD’s

This week in Writer’s Weekly, Angela Hoy reports on how Print On Demand (POD) publishers make it nearly impossible for you to switch to another POD publisher if you are unhappy with the service you are getting. This is an excellent article. Read it – if you plan to self-puublish it can save you a [...]