Earlier this year, I was studying my royalty statement from DAW, comparing my print and electronic sales. I’ve been hearing for years that print is dying and e-books are the future, so I was rather surprised to find that electronic sales made up only 3-5% of my overall book sales.
With this post we begin looking at the key conditions that build reader suspense. Stories are made up of four main ingredients: character, setting, problem, and plot. All of these are important, but problem is the engine that makes suspense go.
Because even watchdogs have to rest sometimes, the Writer Beware blog will be taking a break over the holiday season. Unless there’s a really juicy publishing story, this blog will be on hiatus until the new year.
Picture this–it’s the 1870’s. An African American pharmacist in knee-breeches and a frock coat has just made a startling invention–a refrigeration device. Okay, it’s an improved model designed for corpses, which makes me wonder what other mad scientist stuff was going on in the background, but Thomas Elkins was a REAL GUY. And totally, thoroughly steampunk.
Member News for Jennifer Jackson, Scott Dalrymple, Kameron Hurley, Michael Sullivan, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Cat Rambo.
Since I so often get questions about the legitimacy of literary contests (see, for instance, my posts of December 16 and December 7), I thought it would be helpful to post some suggestions for evaluating any contests you may be thinking of entering.
I had no idea what that book was actually about, or any notion of characters beyond September and the Green Wind. But the book as it exists in the world of Palimpsest presented certain rules, and I always find it wonderful to write confined to a set of rules.
Sometimes it feels like there are a thousand things to remember when writing a story. New writers who make lists of these things soon begin to drown in them. But I’ve come to realize that many of these “rules” don’t matter.
Industry News and Member News for Jennifer Brozek, Matthew Johnson, David Levine, and Paul S. Kemp.
Every fall, I teach my students Walter Pater’s Conclusion to Studies in the Renaissance. What I’m talking about here is not so different from what Pater is talking about: he says that we need to experience each moment fully, to live with a certain passionate intensity that involves continual curiosity, observation.
When an alien swarm decimates his Mars colony, seventeen-year-old Adam Flynn must lead a group of teenagers in a fight for survival.
Auston Habershaw is a science fiction and fantasy author, writing about the could-be and never-was, and also teaches composition and literature at MCPHS University in Boston, MA.
