Smart Things

I've been posting intermittently because I'm ugly busy right now and through to the end of July, but I hope to get back into the groove in August with posts from the frontiers of the new series where I am learning all about writing secondary world fantasy which I have not written since I was a larval writer back in the previous century. It's been highly educational. In the meantime, here are a bunch of other folks saying smart things about writing.

Snurched from Jay Lake: Jeff Vandermeer being very funny on the future of publishing.

Agent Kristin Nelson on why you often can't buy an ebook in English outside the U.S.

Charlie Stross on the post-novel empty feeling. I only get this occasionally. I'm more prone to delight at the opportunity to move on to the next shiny thing.

Lilith Saintcrow on the writer's need for time to be alone, and for stubbornness as a step on the way to developing your process, and on doing what you love even when you're afraid.

There's an interesting conversation going on about whether it's possible to be a full time science fiction writer. I picked it up at Scalzi's where he linked to this piece by Sawyer. More recently Silverberg has entered the discussion which I picked up, again via Scalzi. There's a sub-piece in the Silverberg bit chipping off writers of popular fantasy into a different subset as though they're not really part of the field, which is an argument that tends to annoy me, but hey what do I know, I write fantasy that's intended to be popular. Anyway, very worth taking a look at the ongoing discussion.

Richard Curtis on: Are agents doomed? Interesting perspective on what happens to intermediaries in a disintermediating world. It links to a piece on alternative revenue streams for agents by Jane Friedman which offers some more perspective, but I'm not at all sure that most of those alternative revenue streams are a good idea for writers and some of them strike me as possibly actively bad for writers in that they fuzz up the line between what a reputable agent will do and what the scammers claim to do. He also links to Are Agents Underpaid by Victoria Strauss, which is a nice piece of the puzzle.