On working with writers
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On revisiting lost worlds
The other day I got a note that read, “Just wanted to drop you a line and let you know I read and enjoyed Children of the Wolves! I would love to read more in that world. Do you have any plans on revisiting it?” If you’ve been hanging around here for any amount of…
On what I learned from wind chimes
These are wind chimes. I hate wind chimes. All wind chimes, not just these particular wind chimes. In fact I don’t know these wind chimes personally; I just got the picture from one of those free stock photo websites (see photo credit below! I would hate for the stock photography people to send me a…
On what I learned from writing a romance
I wrote my first romance novel on a dare. I’d been a nonfiction book author and magazine writer for a number of years, and I was working on a mystery of the hard-boiled private eye type. A colleague suggested that the reason the relationship between my protagonist and her love interest wasn’t working was that,…
A Matter of Perspective
Some months ago, when I started working with a Spanish teacher here in Málaga, we were practicing the difference between “ser” and “estar.” Both are verbs that mean “to be” but (in overly simplistic terms) ser is used for permanent states of being (“I am from the United States” = “Soy de los estados unidos”)…
Thank zeus for newbies
I have a colleague who sometimes grumbles about newbie writers. “There’s another nurse/teacher/yoga instructor/high school dropout with no relevant credentials. What makes her think she can break into freelancing?” This is a point of irritation for a lot of established writers: just because everyone can write, everyone thinks they can be writers — as if learning the craft and the business were…
Dealing with rejection
An online writers’ group I belong to recently had a discussion about saying no — how to do it, how to mean it, how to deal with people who try to negotiate after you’ve already said no, and so on. That got me thinking about the other side of the coin — when people say no…
