Every book on how to be your own boss has instructions about when to give up your day job. Each one of these books has a particular rule of thumb. Some say you cannot quit your day job until you have three months’ salary in the bank.
My book has been pirated and shared already. I can’t stop that, and the methods necessary to create a pirate-free environment would transform the internet into something ugly and forbidding.
Sometimes we forget to breathe when it comes to our creativity. By which I mean we are so busy creating and interacting with the world that we forget to pause, to be silent, to be alone. The imagination, the spark of all creativity, is a renewable resource, but it is not an inexhaustible resource.
Gruber was living on dreams and precious else during those lean, dangerous years. He played hide and seek with his landlord until he could scrounge his rent, reduced his food budget by eating “automat” soup (a meal made of the free ketchup and crackers available at the automat, stirred in a bowl, with the hot water for tea to taste), and dropping off manuscripts on foot to avoid any postal costs.
People once learned from one another what was worth knowing and doing, and the best of these memes worked their way through the population like a unending game of telephone. It was only with the advent of mass communication technology like printing, radio, and TV that a select few became able to easily influence great numbers of people. But with social media those select few are now finding themselves increasingly drowned out.
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware
Many of the writers who contact me with Writer Beware-type questions seem to be convinced that the process of getting published is equivalent to a crap shoot. There are enormous numbers of people trying to …
Today the board of directors of SFWA voted to add the magazine Would That It Were retroactively to the list of SFWA qualifying markets. When Would That It Were began publishing in 2000, online magazines were in their infancy. The market criteria at SFWA was geared toward print magazines and at the time there was some […]
SFWA members with Spanish language editions may want to check out this Web site: http://book0dd.blogspot.com/ Which is offering quite a large number of books for download. We’ve verified that the site is offering what looks like homemade OCR’d versions of some of our members books plus many additional SF and Fantasy titles. If you find […]
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware
One of the big publishing headlines this week (here, for instance) was that e-books from some popular authors were selling on Amazon for higher prices than the hardcover versions. For instance, the hardcove…
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
This old saw applies to writers as much as to musicians. In today’s guest blog post, author and writing teacher Barbara Baig explores the impo…
From the Hugo & Nebula award nominated author of Shigidi and The Brass Head Of Obalufon comes a stunning new collection of stories that investigate the rapidly changing role of technology and belief in our lives as we converge to our future selves.
Susan Forest is an award-winning editor and an author of over 25 short stories and Aurora Award-winners Bursts of Fire and Flights of Marigold. Gathering of Ghosts, confronts issues of addictions in an epic fantasy world of intrigue and betrayal.
Register now for the 2024 SFWA Nebula Conference--A weekend of professional development, panels, and networking for ALL genre writers!
