A fellow writer over on Twitter was asking for example elevator pitches to show to some of her friends as examples, and since I’ve got, oh, eight or seventeen of them that I’ve been using for years, I threw several of them at her. An elevator pitch is what you want to have prepared for when you find yourself in an elevator with the high-powered head editor of your favourite publishing house and she says, “Oh, you’re a writer? What are you working on?” This is not the moment to…
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON WILL BE IN DUBLIN IN APRIL *DIES OF EXCITE* Seriously, you have no idea. Meeting him is like bucket-list material for me, and I was SO HAPPY to get to meet him at Loncon, because I figured it was a once in a lifetime chance. And now he’s gonna be doing a thing in Dublin in TWO WEEKS and I’ll get to meet him AGAIN. #diesofexcite In fact he’s doing an entire week of teaching and lectures in Limerick and Ted was like “Are you going to…
Make room, GRRM: Chrysoula Tzavelas knows how to bring on the pain. I’ve just finished CITADEL OF THE SKY, which Chrysoula is in the midst of Kickstarting, and, like, whoa. This is not GRRM-style fantasy, let me make that clear. You don’t spend every turn of the page in fear that your protagonists are all going to be dead on the next one. It’s a cast of several, but not thousands. It’s also under 300 pages, which is like a quarter or a third of the length of a GRRM…
This morning as I was doing revisions on the 4th project I’ve worked on this month I had the shocking revelation that I work a lot. I can hear people rolling their eyes at me from all over the world right now, but it actually was a shock. I think it was because it was the fourth project (REDEEMER synopsis, MAGIC & MANNERS revisions, short story revisions, now SKYMASTER revisions) that I’ve worked on in the past 3 weeks that it really hit me. And if I get this done…
I hate revising. I particularly hate it when I’m going over a manuscript that, when I finished writing it, I thought was REALLY BAD and probably needed to be totally thrown out, and six weeks later when I look at it again I’m like “this appears to mostly work and i can’t tell if it actually works or if it’s just this HUGE GAPING BLIND SPOT OF DENIAL.” Even more aggravating is that the last 3 chapters of my printed manuscript mysteriously disappeared and so I was left in the…