You know that part of the submission process where you send in your work and sit back, fingers and toes crossed, and wait and hope? If you’ve ever submitted your work, chances are pretty good you also know the part where your work comes back with a rejection. All the weeks and months of waiting and hoping come crashing down with the intensity of a kidney punch. You have two ways of dealing with such a blow. You can curl up in the fetal position and swear to never do it again. Sometimes this means you give up on writing completely and sometimes you simply refuse to send your work out again. I call this the “I will never love […]
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Take a Moment to Say “Thank You”
I talk a lot about writing and the many challenges I face in doing it. Sometimes I complain about how much time it takes or how I hate waiting. Bitch, bitch, bitch. It feels like that is all I do some days. I know I celebrate some of the triumphs but I just realized that I have sorely neglected to say two words to a number of very important people. Thank you. I talk about my obligations to my family all the time but I don’t think I’ve ever said just what my family has done to allow me to pursue this dream of mine. Let me fix that (major) oversight on my part. First and foremost, let me say […]
Read moreThe Power of Promotion
For those of you who tuned into the site yesterday, you would have noticed a strange message. In it I appeared to be talking about NanoWriMo only to have a weird “hacker” type message appear. This was not a mistake. I had actually volunteered to participate in JC Hutchins’ promotional campaign for his “7th Son, Descent” book launch yesterday. The premise was as follows: one of JC’s characters in “7th Son” is a world-class computer hacker. Wouldn’t it be fun if several sites were “hacked” by the character for promotional purposes? The same idea was carried out on Twitter too. JC has always had innovative promotional ideas and I take notes every time he comes up with something new. Promotion […]
Read moreGird Your Loins
I know I’ve talked about NanoWriMo before (last week in fact) but let me talk about it one more time. In 10 days NanoWriMo will once again take place. I will, once again, go into battle (with myself) and try to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. This will be my fourth year participating and last year I toiled with over 120,000 others. So what is NanoWriMo? As you may have guessed, the crux of NanoWriMo is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. That equates to 1,667 words per day, every day for the month of November. But is that ALL NanoWriMo represents? I think not. NanoWriMo was started in 1999 by Chris Baty and some friends. […]
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