Point of View

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: Writing Hope

by
forest path - hope - pixabay

As a sci-fi author, I have written a number of times before about our responsibility to forecast the future, both to warn the world about what might be coming, and to share my hopes for what we might become. In these last few years, I have written four separate columns about the idea of hope and writing. In these fraught several weeks before the US election, I find myself hoping against hope for change, and then fearing the worst. Every day, there’s a new poll that reinforces that hope, and a new piece of news that dashes it. Biden’s up … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: Choosing the Perfect Title

by
Book Title / Muse - Deposit Photos

So you’ve finished your book, and it’s time to change your working title into your forever one – the one that will stick with your newly finished work for the rest of it’s happy little book life… assuming your Publisher doesn’t change it later. So how do you choose the perfect title? At their best, titles do a few key things for your book. They make a bold statement about what the reader will find inside. They convey (along with the font and cover art) the genre of your book. And they tease the reader and invite them inside. A … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: The Mutable Future

by
crystal ball - pixabay

I just finished a new short story called “High Seven,” which takes place 150 years from now in a future where the world has devolved into a series of city-states that are holding on as best they can against the ravages of climate change. My view of the future has dimmed markedly over the last twenty years, and even more so over the last four. It’s hard now to see a future that’s not defined by climate change, one way or another. I still have hope, and my stories reflect that, but it’s a hope that somehow we’ll manage to … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: (Re)Defining Success

by
checklist - pixabay

I’m in the middle of Pitch Wars, an annual contest to find a mentor who will then help you prep your manuscript for an agent submission showcase next spring. This is my second year participating in this amazing and terrifying event. Last year, I went into it blind, fully expecting to snag a mentor, and having no idea how many thousands of writers were doing the same thing at the same time. My four mentors received our pitches, and I waited, hopeful that I would receive a response, or maybe even more than one. A day passed, then two and … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: Writing Is My Escape From Pandemic World

by
space portal - deposit photos

As I write this, I am sitting in the parking lot at the grocery store waiting for our weekly grocery curbside pick-up. It struck me, driving over here, how small my world has become since the pandemic began. Once a week I leave home to go to the post office, then to the grocery store, and then back home again. Every four weeks, I plug in the Prius to charge up for the next month. I’ve been doing this now for more than six months, and only on a couple occasions have I gone farther than this two-mile radius from … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Point of View: Waiting for #100

by
100

100 is a magic number for authors. There’s an old saying – let’s call it the “Rule of 100” – that you’ll get 100 rejections before you make your first sale. I had maybe twenty, so it’s certainly not a hard and fast rule. But it does give aspiring authors a reason to keep going – what if that golden ticket is just around the corner, and you gave up at 99? They say something similar about trying to get an agent. Agents are the gatekeepers of the mainstream publishing industry – it’s nearly impossible to get noticed by the … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: Upping the Odds

by
gambling - deposit photos

Some writers seem to have an innate sense of the publishing marketplace, surfing adroitly from one trend to another, catching every wave and riding it to success.  The rest of us aren’t so lucky. I’ve been writing seriously for six years now, and I can’t lay claim to catching a single trend. Trends are, by nature, often short and ephemeral – so unless you can turn around a book in ninety days (and some writers can and do) they are notoriously hard to catch. My first book took me five years to write. I did my second book in thirty … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: Making Mistakes

by
Fail / Mistake

Mistakes. We all make them. Yesterday I’d uploaded some changes and corrections for “The Stark Divide.” They were minor corrections – a missing quote, a grammatical error – things a reader had caught and been kind enough to pass along to me. This morning I woke up to the email from Amazon confirming that my changes were live – for “The Rising Tide.” Panicked, I logged into the KDP dashboard and opened the book info for “The Rising Tide.” Sure enough, I had switched the insides over to the text for “The Stark Divide.” These things suck and make me … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: Writing Too Fast

by
speed - pixabay

Is there such a thing as writing too fast? That occurred to me this week as I really hit my stride on my latest novel, “Twin Moons Rising.“ I am zooming through this one, which feels great, especially since I hope to submit it for Pitch Wars next month. I’ve been writing an average of 1000 words a day these last couple of months, but lately I’ve been reaching as high as 2000 – NaNoWriMo levels of writing output. In June, I shifted my writing time to first thing in the morning. I usually get up at about 5:30 AM … Read more

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

POINT OF VIEW: Writing Without a Win

by
Waiting room - deposit photos

It’s been 7,464 hours since my last sale. Not that I’m counting. Honestly, it’s partly my own fault. In October last year fell into a bit of a … let’s call it a rough patch, since we’re not dealing with clinical depression here, and I don’t want to minimize those who suffer from it. Still, I basically stopped writing for months. I’d just finished and published the last of my two trilogies, and had wrapped up a novel, submitted it to Pitch Wars, and then utterly failed to even attract a full manuscript request. Since then, I’ve thrown myself into … Read more