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The Tyee has published my article Who Are BC's Best Neglected Writers? Excerpt:This province has a literary history going back over a century, but we seem to have forgotten most of our key authors. These ten managed to write a...
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I've just found out about Creative Writing Now, which looks like a good resource. An excerpt from the home page:Creative Writing Now was created as a free service by writing teachers to provide a supportive and friendly place for authors...
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I've been exploring a novel I started long ago, changing it from first person to third. It's going surprisingly well: The point of view is still that of my hero, an aging US Marine general in 1935 who is very...
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Walking dogs is a good way to get ideas. This afternoon I was in the woods with Merlin and Lily, thinking about an alternate-history novel I started back in the 90s. The premise (which I decline to share) was pretty...
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A reader just wrote: "I am currently approximately 2/3 through writing my first novel, with roughly 125,000 words. At what point should I start contacting literary agents, now, when I'm finished, etc.?" For some general advice on researching agents and...
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In The Huffington Post, Anis Shivani writes a deliberately provocative article: The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers (PHOTOS). Excerpt, then a comment: Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are...
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Paul Krugman, some months ago, tipped me off to the novels of Charles Stross. I was not disappointed, though I was certainly astounded by his imagination and energy. Now Krugman has sent me to Insufficient data - Charlie's Diary, which...
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Back in the 1990s, when no one wanted to accept my pitches for SF novels, I took a shot at a semi-SF crime thriller. The idea had been kicking around in my head for several years, and I figured this...
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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was re-reading my "chronoplane wars" novels so I could write summaries of them for a team of translators in China. Now I'm on the last of the trilogy, The Empire of...
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I just finished re-reading another of my chronoplane novels, Rogue Emperor, and enjoyed it. I'd forgotten almost all of it, so the characters and their problems were new. I'd even forgotten how Jerry Pierce deals with his climactic struggle in...
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Years ago, my editor told me that dystopian fiction—novels about horrible societies—didn't sell. That was then and this is now. The New Yorker has just published a very interesting article on the boom in dystopian fiction for young readers. Excerpt:Collins’s...
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Some Chinese translators want to publish my SF novels in China, and I sent them my three "Chronoplane Wars" novels. They then asked for short summaries of the novels, and that obliged me to re-read them. So over the last...
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I still recall the shock: January 1968, a brief obituary in Time Magazine about David Stacton’s death at 44 in Denmark, reportedly of a stroke. I’d been reading Stacton’s historical novels for several years, but I had no idea how...
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The Tyee has published my article The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers. Excerpt:Any young person who wants to be a novelist should of course be a reader as well. But some novels can be more hazard than inspiration....
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If you haven't yet read Ken Auletta's piece in The New Yorker, here it is: The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books. It's also, of course, about the future of writers. Excerpt:Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores,...
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