How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

1. You know what I love about hotels? Room service. There were never two more delicious words in the entire English language, were there? 2. Spring is finally here, which I am thrilled about, because I hate winter, but I am also ambivalent about because I hate yard work. If only I could have the easy no-yardwork days of winter with the warm temperatures and blooming flowers of spring. In other words, I need to make enough money to hire a gardener. 3. I am the official owner of a SA 2005 rated driving helmet! It's for track driving, but I'm thinking about putting it on and just driving around town and seeing what people do. Who'm I kidding--they aren't going to notice. 4. Sorry about the blogging lapse there -- some stuff came up (not interesting stuff, just stuff), but I think I'm back on track. 5. This morning in the shower, I had an idea for a scene for a book that I'm not even supposed to be thinking about right now. Isn't it weird how that ha...

1. I am thinking about starting to use Twitter, but I don't know what I'm going to say on it. If I figure it out, I will let you know. Because I know you really care a lot about my thoughts, especially in little bite-sized chunks. 2. The reviews for the iPad are coming in and I have just one comment: your move, Amazon. 3. Spring is here, which would be great except that the kid next door got a basketball hoop last fall and spends hours everyday bouncing a ball erratically on the patio outside my office window. I am going to break his fingers.* 4. J.A. Konrath has an interesting post about the trajectory of his career and where he thinks he's going in the future. 5. HOME OPENER! Oh baseball, how I missed you. ~~~ * Note: I am not really going to break his fingers. I am going to think about it A LOT, though. And I might break his father's fingers for installing the hoop.

Recently, I read a post over at Brazen Careerist in which she says that the worst career advice she's ever heard was " do what you love ."* Yeah, I totally agree. Once upon a time, a long long time ago, in a land far far away, I was going to be an English professor. I loved teaching.** I spent hours and hours preparing lessons plans and assignments. And hours and hours grading papers. And I loved every second in front of my classes*** and working with my students. And I was good at it.**** But the thing about doing what you love is that, when you love something, everything matters. Every mistake, every minute, every mile. I would dissect my lessons and try to perfect them (which any teacher will tell you is impossible. Teaching requires students, and the students are different each time, so a lesson that worked perfectly in one class will bomb in another. In teaching, there is no perfect. There is only good.). I poured my heart into it, for years. And then I ...

Lynn Viehl has an interesting post over on her blog about author self-promotion and the plethora of tools that exist for authors now. Lynn is an interesting writer in terms of self-promotion: she blogs almost every day, and really interacts with her readers, especially for someone with her level of publishing success, but she doesn't do a lot of other self-promotion.* I don't have anything to promote at the moment**, but Lynn's post made me think about what I will do when I'm published.*** I think that's probably the key to successful self-promotion, thinking about what you like to do and making that a tool for promotion. So these are the things that I will do when I get a book published: 1. blog. I've had a blog in some form or another for a long time now (not just this one). I like a blog/website, because it provides a central place for readers to go, and the longer form gives me a chance to expound at great length one stuff that I want to expound on.*...

I've talked about revision before, but there's a difference between revision and editing, although I usually do both at the same time. Revision, at least in my opinion, involves changes at the plot/character level, whereas editing involves smaller technical changes, things on the sentence level instead of the scene level. Along those lines, Sylvia Rochester has a post over at Heart of Louisiana that has tons of good editing tips for polishing up a manuscript that I'm not going to repeat here. They're all great tips and things that every writer should employ during the course of writing. The thing that I have to keep in mind is that, while all these editing tips are useful, they are only useful in the contest of the story that I'm telling. So, for example, most of my main characters are teenagers. Teenagers have a certain cadence and method of expressing themselves that are unique to teenagers (as a stage of development), and then on top of that, there are laye...

1. The Intern has an interesting post a couple of weeks ago about another reason why an author might not want to read your manuscript: if she did, you could sue her .* 2. The one reality show that I never get tired of is The Amazing Race, which is just what it sounds like -- a bunch of people in teams of two race around the world. It's not as annoying as other reality shows for two reasons: (1) there is not much advantage for the teams to form alliances or backstab each other, because the performance of other teams doesn't have a lot to do with how your team performs; and (2) there are no judges and no voting. Period. The team that shows up last gets eliminated (usually). So it's really a bunch of people (some of whom are awesome, and some of whom are less than awesome) racing around the world and doing really cool stuff. 3. Some day, I'm going to hire out my laundry. Seriously. There are very few chores I absolutely hate, but laundry is one of them. 4. P!nk...

First things first, if you're interested in following publishing industry stuff in a regular way, you MUST read Maya Reynolds' blog . She's excellent at (a) staying on top of major developments and (b) explaining them in clear language, along with their implications. This post was inspired, in part, by her reportage. So, as you may have heard, Amazon is the current market leader in the sales of ebook readers. It's Kindle has, according to some reports, 68% of the market share for ebook devices. Unfortunately, Amazon hasn't been a very benevolent monopolist in the book market in general. It's been dictatorial with authors who want to self-publish, requiring its own print-on-demand service . It even attempted, in January of this year, to coerce publisher Macmillan into accepting its terms by removing the buy buttons from that publisher's books when Macmillan wouldn't agree to let Amazon set the price of its ebooks at $9.99 (Macmillan wanted the abi...