Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

So Neil Gaiman has this speech, a keynote address he delivered in 2012. You may be familiar with it – almost everyone is, at this stage of the internet, ‘cause that shit has been linked to and reprinted more times than the goddamn bible at this stage of its career. Peeps will repeat the words Make Good Art like a goddamn mantra. I don’t mind that. As mantra goes, make good art is pretty bloody aces. But for my money, the most valuable part of the speech isn’t the bits that get repeated over and over. It’s not the catchy phrases about making good art when your cat dies or your wife leaves you It’s not the sequence where he lays out his beliefs that there are no rules in art, which creative types lap up like the fun-loving anarchist spirits we all want to be. The most valuable part of the speech is this: Sometimes the way to do

Yesterday’s post was written pre-conference. Today, I’m writing from the other end, at home, on my couch, half-asleep and vaguely unsettled because my nerves are still dancing the GenreCon fandango. I’m tempted to be all false modesty here, but every indication from twitter comments and in-person discussions seems to indicate that the conference was great. We’ll send out feedback forms to all the attendees in a few days and we’ll no-doubt learn about the things we didn’t do so well, but the vast majority of the people seemed to have gotten a lot out of the conference. The comments on the program have been great, with guests and panellists just knocking it out of the park in session after session. I sent out a lot of thanks in the closing ceremony of the conference. I’d like to do so again here, in shorter form: I get an awful lot of love for running GenreCon, largely because I’m the name at

Peeps, we need to talk about Facebook. Specifically, this trend that I’ve noticed with this year’s GenreCon where people have eschewed email and started sending me important queries about the conference via the Facebook PM system. Don’t do this. For the love of all the Gods in all the Heavens, don’t do this. Carve these words into your heart and cleave to them for the rest of your writing career: Facebook is not the place for any kind of one-to-one professional communication.  I’m not talking about the quick, easy stuff – it’s not like the messenger/chat system on Facebook is entirely broken. I use it for all sorts of things: asking the important questions about whether we’re good for write club and whether we need donuts; asking quick questions of friends that have an easy response; the occasional chat with old friends who moved away. It’s great for that, it really is. But it’s pants for anything important. I get the impulse to

TheTruthGirl recently dropped by the comments and asked the following question: Writing is my dream, and all that I have ever wanted to do. The idea of a day job is odious, but a necessary evil. I guess, what I’m trying to say is, would you have any writing advice for someone in my position? At which point, regular readers are probably chuckling a little, ’cause this is one of those topics I can rabbit on about for a while. Turns out, I’ve waxed lyrical about all manner of writing advice in the last couple of years – a lot of it conveniently located under the craft/process and the business/writing life categories here on the blog – and I actually a post about things I wish I’d known as a young writer after I did a talk at a high-school last year. I’m also gearing up to spend a whole year writing blog posts about writing and publishing over at the Australian Writers

I’m going back to basics this week, focusing on my routine and getting back into the habit of getting shit done. This means being in bed by ten o’clock each night. It means getting by 6:15 every morning, making sure I’m at the keyboard and working before 7:00. It means easing back my words-per-day goal to something easily achievable, probably about 750 words, then scaling things up as the week progresses. It means taking a few minutes to back-up my work and settle my thoughts before leaving the house, rather than going to work with a head full of story. It means making my damn bed every morning. ROUTINES MATTER There are writers who can work without routines. I’ve known a couple of them. I’ve pretended to be one myself, from time to time, but I’ve discovered that only works when I’ve been working a dayjob one or two days a week. For me, not having a routine is a luxury

I’m off to nurse my throat infection today, spending some quality time drinking tea and staying warm. With that in mind, I figured I’d throw out a grab-bag of recommended reading for writers from elsewhere on the internet. Two of the links below are on the list of things I wish every writer read before they started their career, while the other two are interesting ideas that really change the way you approach either the craft or the community of writing. A Definition of Author Platform (Jane Friedman) The internet irreversibly changed the nature of writing and, as a result, the nature of writing advice.It became truly noticeable about five years ago, where suddenly new writers would ask as many questions about blogging and promoting their work as they would getting their work published, with Author Platform replacing the publishing deal as the thing every writer was chasing. Jane Friedman breaks down the idea of Author Platform into its component parts and

Writers aren’t fond of the word no. It comes from a career that is built around rejection – we spend so much time getting told “no” by editors and agents that it just because natural to start saying yes to things for the sake of hearing the word. And while there are some phrases where this habitual yes can have all sorts of benefits, there are at least three times when aspiring writers really need to learn how to utilize the word No for their own benefit. NO…I’M NOT AVAILABLE FOR THAT PROJECT When you’re starting out, the thought of saying no to a project seems untenable. You’re spending so much time wanting to be published, sending your work out to slush piles and getting back form responses, that the thought of someone contacting you and offering you a writing gig is vaguely dreamlike. And when you do start publishing and the invitations to write for this anthology or that