I tried. I really did. People have told me for years. “Be more of a pantser,” they’d say. “Don’t plot so much. Surprise yourself.”
I knew I couldn’t sit down to write not knowing what would happen that day. Endings of stories often come to me immediately after the beginnings, sometimes right after the premise. Once the ending actually came first. I thought the “headlights” system would be a… Continue
I recently parted ways with an agent and have begun trying to place a novel with a publisher on my own. The process is as tedious and frustrating as I remember it, and could be used as a tool for AAR to encourage writers to hire agents. If creating a law can be compared to making a sausage, wading through what’s involved to find a publisher is like having to find and kill the required animals, butcher… Continue
I finished reading Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know last night. It deserved all the awards it won last year. Tightly written, well paced, with exceptional character development and a nice twist at the end.
Last fall I read Hardly Knew Her, a collection of Lippman’s short stories. It, too, was excellent, though, as with all anthologies, some stories were better than… Continue
Added by Dana King on April 10, 2009 at 3:19am —
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Ancient Greek playwrights had a simple way to get themselves out of any corner they’d written themselves into: some god, even more bored than usual with immortality, would kill a few minutes by intervening in the mortal drama below. (I have an impression of the gods acting like twelve-year-old buys with a magnifying glass, watching an anthill, wondering what catastrophe they can think up next.)… Continue