... the one where you stare at the blank screen in hopes that the white hot laser beams of frustration from your eyeballs will somehow magically conjure a fic into existence. It does not work.

I'm going to bed now. :(

Some of you have heard already, but for those of you who enjoy Writers Behaving Badly wank: Some woman named Angela Priest has been caught plagiarizing other peoples' books and artwork and posting it to sites like Scribd and Smashwords. We're talking copying word for word, then doing a find-and-replace on character names. (So "Fiona Logan" became ( Read more... )

Agent Kristin Nelson posted a good blog entry about writing mechanics. It includes a list of ten beginner's mistakes that frequently occur within the first couple pages of a manuscript, ones that might cause her to stop reading. It's a good list-- seeing several of those issues in the first page or so of a book would likely make me stop reading ( Read more... )

This review of Jacqueline Howett's self-published novel, The Greek Seaman (hee, I know...) has gone viral, and rightfully so. If you love seeing authors wig out over a negative review, grab some popcorn and start reading the comments. You don't have to wait long, 'cause Howett quickly enters the fray and starts flinging around the crazy like a ( Read more... )

For those of you who don't read news, LJ just started a new community for writers called lj_scribe. Each week, they'll post a different prompt and invite people to post their submissions for a one-sentence story, a haiku, a poem, etc. (I guess they plan to vary the types of submissions.) You can vote on submissions by clicking on the +1 link below each post ( Read more... )

I've been playing around with a new-to-me word processing program called FocusWriter. It's a fairly spartan affair (although less so than Scrivener, I hear) more for people who just want to... well, write something without the need for fancy formatting ( Read more... )

This is the book packaging deal he's trying to sell to impressionable MFA students: You deliver a novel, give up your copyright and agree to take on all responsibility for any legal action brought against the book, in exchange for $250 and a dubious percentage of TV/movie rights and merchandising.There are other details, of course. You'd be ( Read more... )

Out of curiosity, I took a look at local craigslist posts for writing gigs. Besides the truly dodgy-looking stuff, I found ( Read more... )

After the slight disappointment of Sunshine, I really enjoyed this collection of some of Beagle's short stories. Talk about fully fleshed out world-building... Beagle makes it look so effortless that I can't even analyze how he accomplishes it-- he just doesMy favorite stories were "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros", "Julie's Unicorn ( Read more... )

... only the wank is even uglier this time. It's Katharine Kerr, and there must've been a lot of piss in her cornflakes this morning.

What's unusual is that while she slags off unpublished fanfic, she reserves an equally serious smackdown for the published stuff (specifically Gregory Maguire's Wicked books and the new P&P spoofs) for showing "a ( Read more... )