Discussing cover art for an upcoming book, I asked my editor, “Oooh, ooh, can she have a head?” The response: “We don’t promise to give her a head. The model for the photo shoot will have a head, but we may decapitate her. Logic being that readers can identify better with women they can kinda sorta imagine themselves to look like, at least on their best day, back in high school, while wearing an unnoticeable all-body girdle and just having come from the best hairdresser and colorist in town. Yeah.”…
Author: mizkit
The Dalai Lama
Photographer Kyle Cassidy, whom I’ve heard of because Neil Gaiman mentions him regularly, recently spent a weekend at a New York event, photographing the Dalai Lama. He’s done a rather wonderful writeup with even more wonderful photographs at his LiveJournal: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
so will ye…
We have a regular cabbie, Gerry, who knows I’m a writer. Which is to say, he knows I write. I have a vague and desperately incorrect assumption that when I say I’m a writer, people take it to mean I’m, you know. Published. Because that’s what *I* mean. But today in the cab on the way home he said to me, “So will ye be finishin’ yer first book soon?” “Actually,” I said, somewhat bemused, “my thirteenth book came out in September.” The man nearly dropped his teeth. After a…
books that won’t be written
Every once in a while something mind-bogglingly awful happens during or even before the creation of a book, and that something means the book will never be written. Sharon Lee has just made mention of such a book. Fairly recently the third novel of Melanie Rawn’s Exiles trilogy, another such book, was mentioned in comments. Sharon Lee says it seems to be something readers have particular difficulty understanding, and that it must just be a Writer Thing that writers must beg patience for.
FLESH & FIRE
A few years ago, Laura Anne Gilman mentioned a high concept she’d come up with for a new series–a fantasy world in which wine was the carrying vessel for magics. I was *completely* taken with the idea, not in an “I want to write it” sense, but very much in an “I want to read it” sense, and I watched and waited with enthusiastic impatience while she pitched and sold the idea and began to write it. And because I Know People In High Places (ie, the writer), I got…