March 2010

Measuring Up – by Guest Blogger J. Daniel Sawyer

March 29, 2010

Today’s guest post comes from J. Daniel Sawyer, podcaster and author. His short fiction will be appearing in the upcoming anthology “The Pod Complex: A Dragon Moon Press Podthology,” featuring some of the best short stories in speculative podcast fiction, forthcoming in April 2010. If you can’t wait that long, and you shouldn’t, go to [...]

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Relevant Credits vs TMI in Queries

March 25, 2010

If I’m an unpublished author and I don’t have any relevant credits, what should I put in that paragraph in the query where authors list their previous publications and qualifications? I covered this a while ago in my post on query letters, but it’s come up again recently and I thought I’d give it its [...]

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Breathe

March 22, 2010

Getting out and experiencing the world will fill you with more ideas, more viewpoints, more experiences. Getting away from your writing sometimes and just living will give you more to write about. I’m out experiencing. Back Thursday.

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Trust Issues

March 18, 2010

* Should I register my manuscript for copyright before I send it out to publishers, to keep them from stealing my ideas? * I know you only accept digital submissions. However, I can only send this by snail mail because I am concerned over internet privacy. As creative people, we’re all cautioned to protect our [...]

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Ad Astra 2010 – Schedule

March 15, 2010

Ad Astra is going to keep my on my toes this year! I’m especially thrilled to see other people interested in speaking on the verbal/written dichotomy. Working with the novels of so many podcasters, it’s become a strong interest of mine. I note that Dragon Moon Press dominates the “working with a small press” panel [...]

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Knowing the Formula

March 11, 2010

Writing advice will often tell you that you have to know the formula in order to break it. Nothing makes that rule clearer than comedy does. As I mentioned last Thursday on National Grammar Day, without an appreciation for the rules of Grammar, we wouldn’t have the basic framework to understand why LOLcats and Oddly [...]

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Writing Invisibly

March 8, 2010

A question I hear frequently from new writers is, “How do I know if my writing is good enough to try to get it published?” When you’re so close to your own work, it’s hard to have the distance to evaluate your writing and determine whether you’re really ready. Writing should be invisible. You’ve probably [...]

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March Forth for Grammar

March 4, 2010

Every day is Grammar Day around here, but today is special. Today is National Grammar Day. We learn to hate in school, and then we learn to take it for granted out in the everyday world, but if ever there were a quiet, unsung hero that deserved a made-up holiday, grammar would be it. It [...]

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Phrasing a First Impression

March 1, 2010

When you’re submitting a query to an agent or a publisher, you already know that making a good first impression is key. Remember that agents represent and publishers publish. It’s in your best interest to request a result appropriate to the venue you’re querying. It sounds obvious, but as a submissions editor I receive a [...]

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