Category: ad-pre-2021
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My book has a cover!
I’m so excited to share my novel’s cover! Created by Duong Covers, it captures my old-meets-new theme in spectacular fashion. Speaking professionally, it’s also fantastic. In case you wondered why titles are getting so BIG on book covers lately, thank online bookstores and their 100ish-pixel-wide icons. Here, not only the title but the central art…
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My hybrid-genre column
Fiction-writing site The Fictorians features my column on writing a hybrid-genre novel! Come read both about the personal inspiration behind The Demon in Business Class – and what I learned while trying to turn a vague sense of a changing world into a engaging novel! Hybrid Genres at Fictorians.com
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My first interview!
I got to talk about my upcoming novel The Demon in Business Class with the great guys at B&M Baked Podcast. We discuss the story, the background, the editing process, support from other writers, and even the convention-sales business model. My five-minute interview starts at timecode 30:21 – or listen to the whole thing, to hear from many…
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Giving to, not just dealing with
Sometimes leaving is a process. I’m off to Hartford’s Connecticon this weekend to work my publisher’s table and learn direct sales by doing. Which means I should have spent the week blogging reflections on the industry and marketing and such. Instead I did a lot of weeding and yard work, which was twice as hard…
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Make time for new work
My main creative work since my book contract has either been editing my manuscript or developing my (approach to) social media. By any commercial measure, that’s what I should have done. Polishing and sharing best honors my creative expression. One has creative intention too, and each success makes one’s ground more fertile. Recently my editor Vivian…
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Books at AwesomeCon need flair
AwesomeCon‘s sales and promotional floor is so big that guides and maps never refer to it as a unit bound by walls, only to its subsections. All of it is dense with visual stimulus and novelty. Vendors sell comics, books, movies, posters, toys, models, clothing and accessories, even niche products like leather bondage wear or rings…
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Writer vs author (social media)
This is a post about web marketing and how I am working through mine. TL;DR – avoid mistaking writer for author, mistaking content for news.
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On anger
The Promised Land, and its malcontents. In the story of Moses, the aging Moses needs water for his people. Jehovah tells Moses to speak to a rock, but Moses strikes the rock twice. Jehovah lets the water flow, so the Jews can drink, but the cost is that Moses can’t enter the Promised Land. This…
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Twenty lousy minutes on the Freewrite (review)
Less tool than fetish, and disappointing. Funded on Kickstarter, the new Freewrite is a solid, lovingly-crafted device that promises to return writers to a place of distraction-free spontaneity. From its low-power e-ink screen to the aluminum case – with handle – to the deep-traveling satisfyingly-clicky Cherry keys, the Freewrite consciously recalls early computers, manual typewriters,…
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A Republican Hamlet
Blame the English teachers at those fine expensive schools, trying desperately to engage their bored charges with a play about reckless youth. If only the chattering classes had been taught how to read Hamlet properly, they might have better understood this year’s presidential primaries. Let’s do a Republican Hamlet. Best thing is, you don’t have…