Living Forever for One Year
I’m thinking about writing a book that will require me to live forever…for a year. A few years ago there were a rash of books about people who tried to do something to the extreme for one year. I found the concept fascinating, and I read a few of them, most notably The Year of Living [...]
Your Leap Hour
Every year, we turn the clocks back one hour in the fall. If you’re in the midwest, you experience 1:00-1:59 twice, and then you carry on as if nothing happened. But what if something different happened during that hour? What if that hour was a freebie, a blip in time, an hour that happens but [...]
3 Must-See Websites for Readers and Writers
Amazon Kindle Daily Deals: For quite some time, I’ve wondered why there’s no daily deals site specifically for books. With eBooks, it would be so incredibly easy to discount a book for a day and even cap it at a certain number of buyers if you won’t. However, I’m glad I didn’t pursue the idea [...]
Pet Peeve #36: Dream Sequences
I have recently been smitten with an HBO show called True Blood. It’s gritty, sexy, Southern, entertaining, and actually asks some really interesting questions about how supernatural creatures would interact with the real world if they were “outed.” I’ve also discovered (this was a while ago), that like The Notebook, True Blood is an excellent [...]
4 Reasons Why You Should Support This Kickstarter Campaign
A month ago, my little publishing startup, Blank Slate Press, launched a Kickstarter campaign to support our 2012 author selection. Since then, we’ve decided to add one specific author to our docket (we sent him the contract today), and perhaps one other author later in the year (she’s doing a significant rewrite on her novel [...]
Brilliant Blogging
For a while now, I’ve been compiling notes on what makes a great blog. That doesn’t mean that my blog is great–far from it. But I write a lot and I read a lot. I’m constantly observing what makes great blogs work well. So if you’re interested in blogging or you already blog, check out [...]
Tired of Love Triangles
I’m getting a little tired of love triangles in fiction. I don’t mean to offend anyone. I probably have dozens of love triangles in my own stories and I don’t even realize it. My concern is that they seem to be everywhere now, not because they’re realistic or even make for good fiction, but simply [...]
Are You Too Old to Buy Books?
I was really excited to attend Dan Ariely’s talk at the St. Louis County Library Headquarters tonight for several reasons: I rarely attend talks or lectures of any kind, much less on my own. I think Ariely is brilliant, as exemplified by the increase in the number of blog entries here about behavioral economics. Ariely [...]
The Necessity of the Bad First Novel
In helping to critique friends’ writing and working on Blank Slate Press submissions recently, I’ve read a lot of quality work. One thing is evident: This isn’t the first time around the block for these writers. They’ve been honing their craft for years. Many of them, I’m guessing, have a really bad novel sitting in [...]
Graduate Advice
I work at a university church, so every year we say goodbye to a new batch of graduates. We had a sendoff Mass/lunch for them today, and usually the staff imparts some wisdom upon the graduates. Apparently that wasn’t in the schedule this year, but the advice I was going to give was: Your first [...]
Ask Jamey
A kind reader did my work for me by e-mailing me this hilarious letter. Dear Jamey, So I’ve got this beef with the English language. Often when writing by hand (and sometimes when typing) I tend to combine the words “with” and “the” when they are written back-to-back into a new word “withe” and I [...]
My First Book
I got something in the mail on Monday that made me smile. Big time. This is my first published book. Wait, you say? My name isn’t on the cover? Indeed it isn’t. I came on too late in the process to have that honor bestowed upon me. But I assure you that I wrote half [...]
Confession #12: My Time Is My Heaven
I had a unique weekend. I got home from work (followed by a trip to the grocery store) around 7:00 on Friday. I didn’t leave my condo for the next 44 hours. It was lovely. No, I’m not turning into a hermit. I just have some busy weekends coming up, so I committed to a [...]
The Rom Com of Your Life
I asked people on Twitter the other day what their favorite romantic comedies were. I got some great answers, most of which I had seen, but there were a few diamonds in the rough that I’ll have to watch before April (in April I’ll embark on Script Frenzy). Many of you gave me great feedback [...]
Script Frenzy
Every November, there’s an online event called National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Hundreds of thousands of people commit to writing a novel in a single month, starting with 0 words and ending with at least 50,000 by November 30. You don’t “win” anything, per se–just the joy that you completed a novel. It’s basically a [...]
How I Started a Publishing Company Today
Last summer, I decided to start taking my writing more seriously. I didn’t want to go back to school, but I knew that I needed to start getting high-quality feedback on my work (and learn from the experience of giving feedback of my own). Plus I wanted the experience for my startup, TypeTribe. Thus I [...]
Breaking News
A few months ago, I found out about an author named Dan Ariely. His work fascinated me, so I blogged about it a few times (How to Get Someone to Say Yes, The Power of an Irrelevant Option, and The Power of Origin Stories). I also started reading his blog. A few months ago, Dan [...]
Kickstart THIS
I was going to write about something completely different today, but then JoshVision posted this blog entry announcing the launch of his book on Kickstarter, and I can’t stop thinking about anything else. My mind is blown. I’m having braingasms. Kickstarter is a site where you can post a project–usually one in progress–and seek funding [...]
Three Sentences I Love
The other day I was reading a short story on Fifty-Two Stories, and a line jumped off the page and slapped me in the face. It was that good. I haven’t read a sentence like this in a long time: He’d dated since Nora’s death—two or three times, all setups that ended comfortably but without [...]
My One-Person Fan Club
As I wrote about a few days ago, I am the featured writer in the great online literary magazine Reflection’s Edge this month. This news came as a suprise and an honor. An even bigger surprise came a few days after my story was published. I got fan mail. My first-ever piece of fan mail [...]
Featured!
Wow. I’m not often flattered, but I am flattered right now. I knew about a month ago that my story, “The Urban Parasite,” was going to be published in one of my favorite online literary magazines, Reflection’s Edge. What I didn’t know until about 3 seconds ago was that my story was going to be [...]
The Smartest Thing I Did Today
The smartest thing I did today cost me $83.16, significantly reduced my computer’s performance, and took 5 minutes of my time. Yes. I converted my CPU into a sandbox for the enjoyment of my kitten. No, really, today I noticed a blog entry from one of my top five favorite novelists, Lauren Groff, that deeply [...]
The Seven Best Cities in the World for Writers
(Note: The original list was for five cities, but the list has grown thanks to alert readers. If you have a city to add and the data to back it up, let me know.) If you wanted to forgo your regular income for a few months and move somewhere in the world just to write, [...]
Where I Write
I often get mail from readers* asking about where I write. Personally, I’m fascinated about my favorite writers’ working spaces—I wish there was a coffee-table book of photos of famous authors’ desks. I want to know how they organize 600-page plotlines and characters and settings within the bounds of a single desktop. I want to [...]
