Category: The Writing Life
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Using Typora to write a book
Hello friendly people! I’m busily at work on my Princeton press book (working title: What’s So Great About The Great Books?) It’s going gangbusters. Love the book, having so much fun. Writing this book is so pleasurable it almost feels wrong. I do run into missteps occasionally, but I’m chipping away at it each day.…
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Last year I committed myself to doing whatever writing I could publish without having an agent
Hello everyone. I got my COVID booster a few days ago, and today I got dizzy and fell down several times. Not a pleasant experience. But I assume COVID is an even-less-pleasant experience. I am also going through edits on another piece that is going to appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education sometime next…
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Giving up on Envy, but not on judgement
A friend of mine made his first professional short story sale yesterday. It’s been an immensely long time coming. (( In the science fiction world, one marker of whether you’ve ‘made’ it is whether you’ve sold a story to a journal that pays ‘professional’ rates, which is the rate set by the Science Fiction and…
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Being a writer is great, if you can afford it
It’s a truism that all the fun and meaningful careers tend to be competitive and poorly compensated. I’ve been seeing a therapist lately, and when my insurance sends me the amounts they pay him, I’m consistently shocked: it’s less than I bill as a freelance writer. But writing corporate blog posts is not at all…
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If you’re bored by it, don’t write it
I was going to write today’s blog post about how to organize your reading life. I had some trenchant observations to offer, apropos of my reading a few books of literary criticism. But instead of writing that post, I sat here staring at the blank screen for fifteen minutes. Lately I’ve learned to listen to…
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I guess it’s not really surprising that young adult fiction might have an ageism problem
Been thinking a lot about ageism within the writing community. More specifically, about younger writers shutting out or belittling older writers. Ageism to me is fascinating, because it’s the only form of prejudice where you go from oppressed to oppressor and then back to oppressed, and in most cases this happens without you even realizing.…
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Concluded my agent search!
Alright, well that was the most nerve-wracking two weeks of my life. Got a lot of interest in the book, but finally ended up going with the first person who got back to me: Robert Guinsler at Sterling Lord. Very pleased to be working with Robert. He has an excellent track record, but, more importantly,…
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Feeling quite anxious about sending out my book
I’m doing line-level edits to It’s Probably Just A Phase. The book is currently at about 78,000 words, and I’ve found that it’s generally possible to reduce a book by at least 10% simply by going through and tightening the language. I am also going to try to inject some beauty into the language. In general,…
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It’s amazing how a dirty plate can get in the way of writing
Was thinking the other day about how it’s amazing the way little things can get in the way of writing. Like if you have a dirty plate on your desk, you might say to yourself, “I’m gonna clean this plate, and then I’m gonna write.” But then if you don’t clean that plate, you won’t…
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WRAP UP SEASON 2016: My thirteenth year of writing fiction
I generally tend to date the beginning of my fiction-writing career to December 20th, 2003, when I finished my first-ever short story. Since that first year of writing, I’ve kept fairly detailed records of how much I’ve written and on what days. Over time, I added other indicators, like how much time I spent writing,…