So, I spent yesterday afternoon procrastinating, but it was at least useful procrastination - I trawled the web, reading interesting articles on writing and following linkies till I was lost amid the maze of the internet and up to my ears in opinions, thoughts and advice.
To celebrate, I thought I'd offer you a sampling of my link salad.
I have discovered an awesome blog by a fellow Australian - what's not to love? ;) - by the name of Justine Larbalestier. The name is a mouthful, but the site is lots of fun - opinions, insights, and randomicity in roughly equal proportions.
Some sad news for those of us hoping to finance our lives from writing - according to Tobias Buckell's Author Advance Survey the average advance for science fiction or fantasy is $5000 for a first timer, rising to about $12,500 after 5-7 years. When you're writing one book a year - see the comments especially in Nathan Bransford's post - well, you do the math...
Elizabeth Bear discusses the 'you're-good-but-not-great' stage of the writing career, where you're getting personalised rejections with encouraging comments... but they're still rejecions.
And finally, I discovered Storytellers Unplugged, which has an awesome array of tasty articles, not least of which these on layering reality and writing serial characters.
Have fun!
3 comments:
Ooo! Fun, I'll have to go play with these later.... let's see, a book a year.....wouldn't it be nice :o)
Cool links, Inky One! :D Thanks. I read Ms. Bear's post on good-not-great and it was interesting... ugh, I feel there but I'm not sure if it's voice or not. :S
I think I'm either not hitting the right markets or else the stories have something more fundamentally wrong with them I can't see. ;)
Will check out the other linksies later.
~Merc
Well, I've only had 2 rejections so far (*is a baby in the submission pond*) but both of them have been the kind she describes. Personally, I wouldn't surprised if it IS a voice thing for me, since I'm still comparatively new at all this :S
You'll hit it eventually, Merkie. At least you've got /some/ sales out there!
I don't know about 'fundamentally wrong' - I can't see anything (not that that's definitive ;)). Maybe it /is/ a case of markets, since your stuff is typically, shall we say, offbeat?
*submission cookies* anyway. They can't hurt ;)
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