Blair MacGregor's Blog, page 18

Women, Reviews, and Self-Publishing

I thought of writing a long post on the conversation about the visibility of women writers in SFF, but decided it all boils down to this: I am sick unto death of seeing articles and opinion pieces about the need to acknowledge women writers, from publications and groupsthat refuse to review and include and support women who self-publish.

The most common reason given for rejecting self-published works from reviews,sight unseen, is that there are just too many of them to review. By the same toke...

If Self-Publishing Is On Your Mind

… and if you’re worried about doing it “right,” check out When You Are Your Own Publisher over at Jaye’s blog.

Don’t let fear of making a mistake keep you from reaching for accomplishment. Mistakes are fixable. Far more fixable in self-publishing than in trade publishing. A certain level of anxiety is good–it pushes us to check and double-check, to put our best work forward–but too much anxiety leads to really bad decisions.

Tagged: self-publishing, writing

Treasure In Storage

It sucks knowing you’ve forever lost a beloved story because you didn’t properly back up your work.

Six-ish years ago, about the time life went sideways and put my writing plans on the shelf, my computer did a spectacular crash without warning. I had backs-ups and/or hard copies of all but one novella and one short story. Alas, those were two of my favorite pieces. Lesson learned.

I spent most of last weekend helping my mother sort through and clear out a large storage unit. Amidst stacks and s...

The Conversation Continues

WordPress lets me see the places where others have clicked links to reach my site. I didn’t recognize one of the referring pages that landed on a past post (It’s the Same Advice), so I clicked it to find out where it came from. That led me to a LiveJournal were a person had linked to the above post, and Where the Boundaries Are Drawn(over at my LiveJournal). That’s cool.

Then, the comment right under it made me laugh:

The moment a woman describes a guy who came onto her as “creepy”, she loses a...

On Making My Writing Time Matter

Once upon a time, I wrote two to three thousand (sometimes four thousand!) words a day, in four to five hours, routinely. I thought nothing of it. I wanted to write. Stories poured through my thoughts. And my time was severely limited by caring for my infant son, managing the family business, and teaching the occasional class. So when I had a sitter for the afternoon, or an evening free of responsibilities, I wrote like mad.

Somewhere along the way, those thousands of daily words began to soun...

Just Us Women

After a stumble-start last fall, my experiment with a women-only karate class is off to a fantastic new start. The first class was on Tuesday, with seven women in attendance.

Most uncomfortable moment: Making it clear to my own (male) teacher that he needed to leave the dojo before we started class. I’d made it clear to the women there would be no men, no husbands, no children in the dojo at all.

Most awesome moment: When everyone walked out the door saying, “See you next class!”

Once upon a tim...

Best Lawnmower Contest

Here’s a thought: I’ll hold a contest for the Best Lawnmower. You and everyone else drop your lawnmower at my house, I’ll carefully evaluate them, and the winner will get a free landscaping session from my brother. (He’s a gardener.)

Your lawnmower might not win, but you won’t have to worry about it anymore. No, you don’t even have to come pick up! You see, when you entered the Best Lawnmower contest, you gave me complete ownership of your lawnmower. I get to keep it. Or use it to mow my own l...

Musing on Revisions

The changes made to Sand of Bone were extensive enough I didn’t bother editing an existing digital version. I opened a new Word doc, set my handwritten scribbles of chapter overviews and notes and index cards on one side (more on those later) and a well-flayed printout covered in black Xs, arrows, and circles on the other. Then I started typing from word one.

To my great happiness, past feedback on the partially-revised chapters I’d sent to beta readers months ago was mostly positive, though s...

Revisions Completed (Until Next Time)

Today, I completed the deep revisions for Sand of Bone.

Pause for extended fanfare of trumpets…

I’ll have to wait for beta-reader feedback to know how close the novel is to the proofread-for-publication stage, but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

Currently, the novel comes in around 128K words. Somehow — despite the fact I completely altered and expanded the worldbuilding, and let myself play much more with dialog — I cut nearly 30K from the previous draft. Thirty thousand words! I don’...

The Tedious Fun of Revisions

By the time I head off to bed tonight, I’ll have completed upwards of a third of the revisions for Sand of Bone. Other than a thousand words or so of a new scene I’ve decided to add, the rest of revisions should move more quickly. Fewer alterations, fewer reorganizations, fewer new elements to entwine. That’s a symptom of how I wrote this novel: it took me fifty thousand words to figure out why certain pieces of the plot could and should happen the way I wanted them to, so I had to go back th...