What You Get From a Book Nobody Buys
A book of mine sold poorly and has been quietly useful for years. Sales is the number everybody reaches for and it is close to irrelevant for most professionals.
Tag: Writing Craft (Page 19)
Authority Through AuthorshipWhat Your Book Has to Survive After You Send It
A book has to survive your job title changing, a sentence travelling without its paragraph, a competitor publishing something similar, and being handed to the wrong reader.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Jake and the Bullies
A realistic novel about a kid harassed online has been written a thousand times and no seven-year-old finishes one. So Jake goes inside the internet, where trolls have caves and algorithms have addresses, and the villain is a machine that…
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Forty Worlds
This collection is reconnaissance. I intend to write a novel in every genre, and forty short stories across forty genres was a way of dipping a toe in each one before committing a year to any of them.
Character DevelopmentBehind the Book: The Dead Don’t Need Stuff
My father died with a one-bedroom apartment filled floor to ceiling and two full storage units, while being broke. I was three thousand miles away, so I told the apartment manager to donate all of it. Nobody objected, and nobody…
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: Eurydice
Jules Verne gave Tom Ayrton about thirty pages and never went inside him. Twelve years alone on Tabor Island, marooned as punishment, rescued and reformed and killed off as machinery for somebody else’s adventure. This is his account.
Authority Through AuthorshipThe Consultant Who Wanted a Business Card
A consultant asked me for a book he could hand people. Not an argument, a credential. He got it, and nobody read it, and it did nothing for him.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Verne wrote political manifestos with a plot wrapped around them. The situation is strong and there is nobody inside it, so this version hands the narration to the harpooner who wants off the ship.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: The Time Machine
Wells wrote a class allegory dressed in science fiction and sent his Time Traveller forward alone, which makes the middle of the book pure narration. This version puts somebody in the seat beside him.
Authority Through AuthorshipThe Parts of Writing a Book Nobody Warns You About
You will hate one chapter for no good reason. Somebody else will know your career better than you do. The hardest week is the one after the manuscript is finished.
Fiction WritingBehind the Book: The Sphere
The Sphere began with one rule: no faster than light travel. Remove that and humanity cannot leave, which means the only remaining direction is inward. The subject is a forty thousand year construction project, which contains no action at all,…
ADHDBehind the Book: My Life in Crazytown
I was diagnosed AuADHD at sixty-four, and the diagnosis is the reason this book exists. One of the answers it supplied was that the traits my family spent nineteen years trying to suppress were the traits keeping me alive in…