BooklifeNow.com, a website that serves as support for and a supplement to Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer by author Jeff VanderMeer, is proud to announce a new website rebranding and content management team that aims to keep current with changing trends in the writer’s market, as well as increase reader engagement and grow the reader base.
A week or so ago, I asked a bunch of writers to share some of the best advice they’ve received and how they’ve used it. At the same time I asked them to share some of the worst, the weirdest, or the least helpful advice they’ve encountered over the years.
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.
Sometimes, no matter your best efforts, you’ll find yourself stuck in a rut, bored with your work and yourself. At such times, here are a few techniques that may nudge or jolt you out of that mood.
More than two thousand years ago, the strategist Sun Tzu wrote that the warrior skilled in indirect warfare is as inexhaustible as Heaven and Earth, as unending as rivers and streams, and passes away only to return like the four seasons.
Blacksmith Wystan accidentally breaks off a sliver of Excalibur. It’s magic sends Wystan to present day England where he must fulfill his blood vow to reunite the piece with Excalibur or the rightful heir before the sword and its magic are lost.
Garrett Boatman is the author of Stage Fright, Floaters, Night’s Plutonian Shore, The Clocks of Midnight, The Mirror of Eternity, and A Prisoner of Dreamland. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.
