All Entries Tagged With: "publishing"

The Turkey City Lexicon (Part 6 – Character and Viewpoint)

Alas we come to the final section of the Turkey City Lexicon, character, viewpoint and other miscellaneous things. Sufficed to say if these are your only problems with the story after managing to accomplish every else in the other five parts of the turkey city lexicon then fixing these mistakes should be a cakewalk. On [...]

What can we expect from Tor Books this season?

While at Worldcon in Montreal I had the opportunity to go to the publisher’s presentation for Tor Books with all of their editors (including Patrick Nielsen Hayden, David G. Hartwell, and Tom Doherty) present and I can honestly say that if Tor delivers on the goods this year in terms of their books we can [...]

The Turkey City Lexicon (Part 5 – Background)

One of the more difficult aspects of short story writing is getting across to the reader a clear sense of backstory to a character or place without it being one gigantic infodump. Setting a story in a particular context (whether it be that of a place or that of a character) can also be seen [...]

Jim Baen’s Universe to be Closing in 2010

Apparently this has been on the wire for over two months but for those aspiring writers out there hoping to get their short stories published some day, they should note that Jim Baen’s Universe will be closing with its last issue to be published in April 2010. The bimonthly online science fiction and fantasy magazine [...]

The Turkey City Lexicon (Part 4 – Plots)

Plots are the cousins of story ideas. Well, not really, but in terms of crafting a good short story (or novel) they are important. Just as any story need a plot that is original and not cliched, plots need to be well formulated, concise, and, most importantly, they need to make sense. So here is [...]

The Turkey City Lexicon (Part 2 – Words & Sentences, Cont’d)

Here is the second part of my six-part series entitled the Turkey City Lexicon. Click Here for the first part.

While many aspiring writers have no problem writing short stories, most seem to have a problem with reading short stories, a feature evident upon reading their works. Many aspiring writers assume that writing short stories is [...]

How to Deliver the Perfect Elevator Pitch

A week ago, I bookmarked a post on io9.com on Delicious entitled “Make You Epic Space Novel Live Up To Your Elevator Pitch” and didn’t look at it until yesterday. Expecting to read an article on how to deliver the perfect elevator pitch I was presented with something verydifferent, leaving me to scratch my head [...]

Amazon Acts as Thought Police, Deletes 1984 From Kindles

A few days ago owners of the popular e-reading device the Kindle woke up to find that certain digital editions of George Orwell’s book “1984” and “Animal Farm” were inexplicably deleted from their devices by Amazon. Many questioned the reasons behind Amazon’s move to remotely delete digital editions from their devices, among those questions. Why?

Many [...]

4 Other Ways to Get a Literary Agent

In today’s publishing industry the traditional methods of getting a literary agent is as follow: (1) aspiring writer submits manuscript to literary agent (2) agent either accepts manuscript or rejects it. It’s no real secret, that’s how it usually goes, and the publishing industry today is cutthroat for new authors. This is added to the [...]

John W. Campbell Memorial Award and Theodore Sturgeon Winners Announced

It seems there’s no stopping Cory Doctorow and Ian R. MacLeod as both tie in winning the 2008 John W. Campbell Memorial Award with their novels Little Brother (Tor) and Song of Time (PS Publishing) respectively. Locus Magazine noted that this is the third tie in the award’s history. It should also be noted that [...]