by Ken Pelham
Your stiff-upper-lipped hero, Professor Jenkins, frustrated with the chicanery of Air Captain Hamm, pounds the table and shouts, “Good heavens, man! The scoundrel has hatched yet another outrageous boondoggle!”
Boondoggle. This is where your narrative gets stuck in the etymological weeds.
by Paul Jessup
Novels are like long, committed relationships. They take months to years of your life, and they require complete and utter devotion to their singular purpose. Certainly, there is something to living inside of a novel, breathing inside of it, thinking about it every moment of your day. It’s an all-consuming thing, as exhausting as it is rewarding.
by E. D. E. Bell
As a former engineer, data analyst, strategic advisor, and manager who entered the fiction writing and fiction editing world not too far apart and not so long ago, I’ve had to come up to speed quickly on concepts and best practices that a lot of editors my age have been practicing a long time.
by Deborah Walker
I don’t find productivity to be a one size fits all discipline. Sometimes a theory or technique just doesn’t resonate for me. For example, I’ve never got on with the Pomodoro technique, but some authors love it. I listened to a podcast recently where a motivational speaker was very insistent that if you don’t have goals then you can’t achieve anything worthwhile. Goals aren’t for me. I’d rather define processes rather than goals. I’ll write every weekday rather than I’ll finish a novel in a year. Many productivity experts swear by meditation, but I don’t care for it. The best advice for techniques is to try them on for size and see if they fit.
by Sandra M. Odell
I have struggled with the titanic highs and crushing lows of severe mental illness and PTSD most of my life, yet nothing quite prepared me for the psyche shitstorm that followed the release of my second collection, “Godfall & Other Stories. ”
by Hunter Liguore
When it comes to writing, especially the novel, we can never give up! We’re essentially running our own ‘ultra-marathon.’ Looking at a runner who will traverse 100 miles over 30 hours, we must see the significant amount of training that went into this. Considering the above scenario, this ultra-runner must’ve spent at least half to a full year of deliberate planning/training just for this one race.
By Annette Siketa
Picture this – a searing Australian summer, roads melting, birds dropping out of trees, an overexcited thirty-six-year-old daughter, and me – her mum, trying to keep cool in every respect. And the reason for said daughter’s excitement? A private meeting with David Duchovny.
by Filip Wiltgren
I’m a quitter.
I’ve quit school five times, quit jobs, quit my freelancing career, quit clubs, sports, diets, pretty much everything except relationships, which get quit for me. In short, I’m an expert at quitting.
by Luna Corbden
I’ve heard that insomnia is a common problem among writers. At least, it is for me.
I also frequently get stuck on “what happens next?” in my stories, which leads to me staring at the blank page, which leads to me opening Twitter, after which my writing session is shot. I might get stuck on that problem for weeks and weeks, my mind completely unwilling to focus on solving it when there’s nothing but a boring white page in my visual range.
What if there was a way to (partially) solve both problems at once?
Welcome to the December edition of the SFWA Market Report. Please note: Inclusion of any market in the report below does not indicate an official endorsement by SFWA.
In this sequel to Where Oblivion Lives, a coded notebook containing the identities of Los Nefilim’s spies falls into enemy hands. Diago must nurture the daimonic song he has so long denied in order to save those he loves.
R.W.W. Greene is a New Hampshire writer whose debut novel “The Light Years” is springing from the presses at Angry Robot Books on Feb. 11, 2020. Publishers Weekly dubbed the book “clever” and Greene “an author to watch.”
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