Terena Scott's Blog, page 34

Rain all the way from Japan

My muse is running down the street in her underwear, shouting, "Rain!" She is giddy with the smell of it, the feel of wind and rain all the way from Japan flowing on her skin. Her snakes are shivering in a frenzy, lapping up the rain drops with golden tongues, eyes wide in wonder because they forgot what rain smelled like. It's been too long since Northern California has felt rain, and now it seems that four years of drought is trying to break free in one glorious torrent in one stormy day.

Th...

Freshly Printed Manuscript Pages, and One Lost Essay

After printing out the punk anthology on my laser printer, I held all 180 pages and inhaled their warm, inky, clean goodness. I love the smell of freshly printed work. The weight of the pages in my arms was comforting, my reward after three years of struggle to create this book. A validation of my vision. I was at last... done.

I showed the pages to Rick and he smiled, then said, "Now if I can just get the design part done!"

Yeah, that would be nice. I nodded. "It will come. You're slammed with...

Identify the resources you'll bring to your business.

From Chapter 3 of the book, What You Need to Know to Be a Pro: The Business Start-Up Guide for Publishers, by Terena Scott.

Resources

Your resources are your money, personal talents, equipment, knowledge, and expertise that will help you and your business thrive. It's important to understand what resources you need for your business. All the talent in the world won't support your business without cash. Cash won't make up for talent. It takes a balance of resources for your business to thrive.

...

The Lull

The Punk book deadline has been pushed to after the New Year and I can't proceed with any of my plans until the designer does his part. So now I wait... and sit... and spend too much time cruising Facebook and surfing from link to link within interesting articles on the net. Hours pass and I accomplish nothing, other than read about the idea that the semi-colon is "girly."

There isn't a "next book" to edit for the press, so for the first time since starting Medusa's Muse I have a break. It fee...

Banned Books Week

Celebrate Banned Books Week this week by reading a great book like:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger

His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini

Any of the Harry Potter Books, by JK Rowling

In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak,

...or any other book on the banned book list.


Every year, during the last week of September, the American Library Association hosts events across the country celebrating free speech. F...

More Delays in Google Books Settlement

The latest from the battle over Google Books.

From an article written by Tom Krazit, at CNET news:

When the Department of Justice made it clear last Friday that it could not support the settlement as written--which would give Google unique rights to scan out-of-print books still protected by copyright law--it said the parties were in talks to amend the settlement. In a joint brief (click for PDF), lawyers the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and others asked Judge Denny...

Equinox turns me on

Summertime is not my creative friend. I feel stifled and listless the longer the sun shines each day and the hotter the temperature gets. By July, when the thermometer hovers at no less than 95 and the sun stays up until 9 pm, my ability to write prose vanishes. Even my dreams are vapid (I actually dreamed about doing dishes two nights in a row last week).

Now that equinox has come, I feel like my muse plugged my mind into a nuclear power plant. Suddenly I am flush with brilliant ideas, vivid...

Reacting to Criticism

I read this great post on copyblogger about dealing with criticism, written by Johnny B. Truant. Here's an excerpt:

One of the most interesting lessons I learned about blogging happened in the basement of a Swiss pub on Christmas Eve.

Back in 1999, my brother and I went to visit our sister in Switzerland. Somehow, we all ended up in this basement room at a pub in Interlaken with some locals. For some reason, the lights started going on and off, and I caught this look on my sister's face. There ...

Ode to Opium

My muse lounges on my bed, dressed in a tight, black Victorian corset, black silk bloomers, and stiletto heels. Her snake hair is piled high on her head like a Gibson girl, but she looks more like a porn star vampire than an Edwardian icon. "You know," she says, drawing on a cigarette held in a long ivory holder, "Your surgery would have been a lot more fun with Opium."

I shake my head and glare at her. "Sorry. Can't take the stuff."

"Why? What happens?"

"Makes my psychotic. I see things and hea...

Dirty Dancing

I just finished watching Dirty Dancing for the thousandth time and cried through most of it. I can't believe Patrick Swayze is gone. He was only 57. It was too soon for him to go, too soon for him to stop dancing.

Another icon from my childhood has vanished: Micheal Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, John Hughes, and now Patrick Swayze. All of these people had a big influence on my life, but none more than Patrick Swayze. I saw Dirty Dancing five times in a week and a half when it was at the theater, al...