Sorry about my recent slow rate of posting, campers; as the sharper-eyed among you may have noticed, we here at Author! Author! have been experiencing what the old television shows used to call euphemistically technical difficulties. Quite a bit of progress can be seen behind the scenes, I assure you, but it will be a …
Continue reading “Me and you and a boy? girl? dog? named Snafu”
I had meant to devote my next post to showing you fine people more examples of title pages done right — and done wrong, so we could discuss the difference. Why invest the time and energy in generating both, you ask? Clearer understanding, mostly. Oh, I know that I could just slap up a single …
Okay, I’ll cop to it: I get carried away sometimes by good questions from readers. Clearly, those of you who have been hanging out here at Author! Author! for a good, long while have gotten used to that, for not a single one of you raised your paws into the air to point out, “Excuse …
We have ample cause for public rejoicing at Author! Author! today, gentlefolk: for the first time in several nerve-wracking weeks, most of my site’s images appear to be visible to the naked eye of a casual bystander. And that’s good news, I suspect, both for your humble correspondent, the toiling soul generating most of the …
Hey, campers — At long last, my site has come out of its unanticipated exile! Many thanks to those who kept checking in to see what was going on, and even greater thanks to those of you who took the time to check my blog’s other haunts, on my Facebook fan page and Publishers’ Marketplace. …
Continue reading “Oh, look, here comes Mozart, and other pitfalls of writing about the past”
Sorry about the unexpected hiatus between my last formatting post and this one, campers; I honestly did mean to follow up within two or three days. My blogging time has been a trifle more difficult to schedule since my car crash, however — I never know when someone is going to decide to pop me …
Continue reading “The rules, part IV: so that’s how a book manuscript should appear on the page!”
The wee tourist trap where I took this is stuffed to the gills with practical people, evidently. If you look closely in the background, you’ll see that there’s also a liquor-and-sundries store. In retrospect, I wish I’d documented what the locals considered sundry, as opposed to requisite. Beginning to sense a theme here? Excellent. Today, …
Continue reading “The rules, part III: the bare necessities”
Hard to believe anyone in his right mind would actually need to be told that those are gumballs, isn’t it? They strike me as the epitome of the breed: large, spherical, colorful, and — dare I say it? — potentially jaw-breaking. Yet clearly, at some point in the probably not-too-distant past, some passing myopic presumably …
Has everyone had time to absorb this week’s earlier post on what a professionally-formatted book manuscript looks like? I realize that for those of you brand-new to presenting your writing to agents, editors, and contest judges, that single-post overview might have run a bit quickly. In the interests of clarity, I’m going to be devoting …
Continue reading “Once more, with feeling! (And color, apparently.)”
As I don’t see how anyone prone to hanging out here at Author! Author! could fail to be aware, I’m not a big fan of making aspiring writers guess what they’re supposed to do; writing and submitting a first book is stressful enough without having to wonder what page 37 should look like or what …
Okay, I’ll confess it: I find writing for an audience as diverse as the Author! Author! community more gratifying than I would addressing a readership more uniformly familiar with the ins and outs of the writing world. I particularly like how differently all of you respond to my discussions of fundamentals; it keeps me coming …
Continue reading “Yet another typo prone to distracting the professional reader’s eye just a trifle”
As those of you who have been hanging out here at Author! Author! for a while are, I hope, already aware, I’m no fan of one-size-fits all querying advice. Or generic writing rules allegedly applicable to all writing everywhere, for that matter. While there are indeed some standard expectations hovering above the querying process — …
As Virginia Woolf — whose birthday all right-minded literary types are celebrating today — tells us, “Fiction must stick to the facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction.” Our old pal and nemesis, Millicent the agency screener, might like to add, however, “Yes, but that does not mean that everything that has …
Continue reading “Capturing the distinctive buzz of reality”
Before I launch into today’s festivities, please join me in applauding a longtime member of the Author! Author! community, J. A. Turley — better known around here as John — for publishing his gripping narrative nonfiction account of the Gulf oil spill, The Simple Truth: BP’s Macondo Blowout. Congratulations, John! It’s also, you may be …
Surprised not to see a post on formatting occupying this space, campers? You should be: for the past seven years, I have embraced the decline of the old year and the advent of the new as an opportunity to provide the members of the Author! Author! community with a solid explanation of something that new …
Continue reading “There’s more to writing a memoir than sitting down and telling the truth?”
This time of year, the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver sees it all the time: a reason to move otherwise good girls and boys from the Nice to the Naughty list. Yet often, as both he and our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, know only too well, the difference between a properly-punctuated sentence and one that …
I’m going to keep it short and semi-sweet today, campers — tomorrow, if you will recall, is the deadline for entries to The Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012, this year’s edition of the Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence. To be specific, your fabulously-detailed scenes must be submitted by midnight in your time zone …
Continue reading “This time, I mean it about the deadline — and I always mean it about logical flow”
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I always wish my readers joyous holiday gatherings with just a touch of trepidation, I must admit. Why, you ask? Well, let me put it this way: in descending order of probability, a fellow writer, a writing blogger, and an editor provide the three most likely shoulders writers will dampen with their …
No time for a lengthy missive today, I’m afraid, but I could not resist sharing a bit of tangible evidence in support of a theory long lurking in the minds of editors across the English-writing world: in recent years, many people’s eye-brain connections seem to have ceased working reliably. At least insofar as signage is …
Continue reading “These are the times that try editors’ souls”
My apologies for not corresponding with you as extensively as usual over the last few months, campers: I could plead deadlines stacked up like cordwood; I could whine about health setbacks that would have made Asclepius turn pale; I could frighten you by references to a workload that would cause Heracles to glance up from …