TaleSpinner: Cory Doctorow On Giving Away E-Books
12 Dec
Posted by Raj Dash as Writing career, Authors, Featured
Boing Boing co-founder and science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow wrote in Forbes recently about how giving away free e-books has actually helped him get sales. It might seem a contradiction, but read his explanation to understand why it actually works.
Can You Write A Novel In One Month? November Is NaNoWriMo Time
12 Nov
Posted by Raj Dash as Writing career, Technique, Daily quotas, Fiction, Featured
If you’re an aspiring novelist and just don’t know where to start, how about just writing? NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a yearly contest where participants simply write during the entire month of November. The object of the yearly contest is about getting your novel done, not worrying about editing. At least not up front. Basically, just do it. Get 50,000 words written by month’s end. You can sign up until the very last second, on the last day of November. There’s no fee, either, but you can contribute.
Marianne Richmond: One Million Books Sold
12 Nov
Posted by Raj Dash as Writing career, Authors, Milestones
Illustrator Marianne Richmond has joined an elite club upon the sale of the one millionth copy of one of her books. Compare this with common figure of less than 99 copies for a given book. Very few books get a print run of over 2 or 3,000 copies, let alone sell in the thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Lovers of the printed word may want to check out this slick reader, the Sony Reader PRS-500, which goes for US$350. I wrote something about it when it was still a twinkle in Sony’s eye. But now it’s actually coming out: on Hallowe’en, Oct 31st. It’s tricked out with a 6-inch (diagonal) display, has a DPI of 170 pixels, 4-levels of gray, and 7500 pages of battery life.
Amit has a post about a new device called the LongPen. The device appears
The Canadian publishing arm of the Harper Collins publishing company have a program called FirstLook, which lets you sign up to look at ARE (Advanced Reading Editions) of various new books before they are published.
Old Window - Collaborative Fiction Series
16 Feb
Posted by Raj Dash as Fiction, Collaborative fiction
The Internet allows humans to communicate in ways that were not formerly possible. One exercise that I’ve always wanted to try is collaborative fiction. Upon scanning my writing journal, I came across a few fragments of fiction from Jul 2003 that show a bit of promise in the mystery, horror, or slipstream genre. It’s rough material, but I’ve threaded a few pieces together into an intro. What I’m hoping is that as this journal grows in readership, that some of you who are writers will participate by adding to the story, in sequence.
As Angelo got on the bus, he realized his mistake. But he’d been so thirsty, had gulped down gallons of water like a diabetic. And now he couldn’t hold back any longer. He was about to burst. It had been a while since he’d let loose. But he was out in public, on a bus. He couldn’t do it here. It was an outrageous idea. Maybe at the back. . .
Shortly after sunrise, Constable Bill McDearmotte is already on the beat. I see him from a distance, about four blocks from here. He should be resting, taking his deserved time off. But he’s so dedicated that he doesn’t seem to know when to quit. I can hear his standard-issue police shoes beating the pavement, even from this distance. Like an old-school officer, he tips his hat to the ladies and nods to the men. He waves to Joe the grocer, Milla who runs the cheese shop, and the numerous other merchants that he’s gotten to know over his nearly thirty-year career. Even though this is the city and everyone is too busy these days to notice anyone else, everyone that knows him sees him, watches him pass. He’s kept them safe for decades; they all love him. They also know that he should be resting; most of them have heard the news. But they are not surprised; his devotion to duty is legendary.
Here’s an entry from my writing journal from Mar 3, 2003, slightly edited for publication:
During the months of Jan - Mar 2002, I set a goal of writing at least 5000 words daily of something. What I did was chart my daily word count, then averaged it out on a sliding window of 7 days. What I found was that I couldn’t always reach 5000 words, and not all of it was usable for fiction. But on the best days, I reached 12,000 words, 3,000 of which would be fiction. A lot of the remaining text could be used for purposes such as this posting - in the future.
Writing full-time as a career requires strong discipline. Every writer knows this, but it’s easier to think that you’ll meet the writer agent or editor somehow by magic. The boring fact is that you have to do your writing like a project. Each piece of writing is a different project. Imagine that each “project” has been commissioned by a client. You have deadlines (making them soft for now), and you must keep the related information organized for several reasons. One is that you want to be able to easily retrieve a project. Two is that you want to be able to send a client any information regarding the project in a suitable manner. Three is that if your projects are organized, you can track how things are going.
The problem with having an active imagination like mine is that if you don’t employ some discipline, it is so very easy to come up with hundreds of story ideas. The time it will take you to note these ideas and plot them basically dissolves any actual writing time. To avoid this kind of problem, I make a brief note of the idea, then let it go. One character or another starts formulating in my head and says that they want to be in such and such a story. Sometimes I also review fragments of ideas and character profiles from the past, and they make sense in the context of the new story idea.
This site is a journal documenting fiction-writing techniques. As well, I’ll be presenting a selection of mostly short fiction that I’ve written over the years.
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