Martha Wells's Blog, page 202

It's a cool morning (so far) and I can hear squirrels thu...

It's a cool morning (so far) and I can hear squirrels thumping around up on the roof. It's been a slow weekend, though I'm hoping to get some work done today. I've been mostly tinkering with a new cleaner design for my web site and experimenting with Wordpress.

I've been having some odd, somewhat depressing dreams. On Friday I dreamed that I found Spike, (my dog that died of cancer three years ago), running in a field and took him back home. And then I called my mother, who passed away s...

There's an interview with me up now at Absent Willow Revi...

There's an interview with me up now at Absent Willow Review

ETA: and there's also an interview with me, Melissa Scott, and Jo Graham over at The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 5.


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Bradley Denton's SF novel Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is being made into a movie.


Book View Cafe has released: Breaking Waves - An Anthology for Gulf Coast Relief Join writers from all genres in defense of the Gulf Coast with Breaking Waves: An Anthology for Gulf Coast Relief. Edited ...

Heard some very bad news yesterday: The Sudden Loss of D...

Heard some very bad news yesterday: The Sudden Loss of David Thompson David was the publicity manager of Murder by the Book, the best bookstore in Houston and one of the best bookstores, period. He was one of the people who made the store such a fun, friendly place, and he was fantastic at recommending books. The book signings I've done there were some of the most fun and most smoothly run, and David was always helpful and encouraging. He was also the owner of Busted Flush Press, and very ...

Yesterday was the two year anniversary of hurricane Ike.H...

Yesterday was the two year anniversary of hurricane Ike.

Here's a link to Boston.com's Big Picture One Year After (I've actually met the man in picture #11. He's the owner of Bistro LeCroy on the Strand in Galveston, and we've eaten lunch there several times. Which you should all do if you have a chance, because it is truly delicious and worth far more than the small amounts they charge for it.)





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From jess_ka : Abra SW is posting a serialized steampunk novel, to get donations for her mothe...

I'm having all kinds of trouble getting started this morn...

I'm having all kinds of trouble getting started this morning, mostly sinus-related reasons. We did some cleaning out of the kitchen cabinets yesterday to make room for a new wok, and I need to take the resulting carload of random crap we don't need to the Good Will at some point this morning.

First episode of the new season of Venture Brothers started last night.

I was going to do a post on the anniversary of hurricane Ike today, but maybe tomorrow.

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From janni : A Writer's Responsibility...

We went to the Caldwell Czech Heritage/Kolache Festival y...

We went to the Caldwell Czech Heritage/Kolache Festival yesterday afternoon. Fun, but it was hot. Like, really hot. Or, as one of the vendors we passed said, "Oh sweet merciful lord, the heat!" It was held in the downtown square and streets around the courthouse, and the problem with little old towns holding their festivals in their little old downtown area around their courthouse, is that the old brick buildings there tend to reflect and hold in the heat from the street, the way an open ...

Another Writing Question

thanate asked I keep seeing people say that one ought to look up agents who have worked with similar books to what one is trying to publish, which seems like good advice but I haven't seen any suggestions of how to go about it. Are there ways to find out who agented a particular book, or even who a specific author's agent is without pestering the people in question?

Some writers list their agents on their web sites in the "contact" section, but also some agency sites list their clients. Lik...

More Writing Questions

toliver also said Plus I listened to a panel of editors at DragonCon and they said network, network network. They said to start commenting on different writers/editors/agents blogs, going to workshops and conferences and speaking to the people in the business. Do you think that is helpful too?

I think it's definitely helpful to read the agent blogs (and the Writer Beware blog), because that's a good way to keep in touch with what's going on in the industry, learn how publishing works, and so o...

Writing Workshop Question

toliver said Yes, I have some questions or rather would you do a post about the benefits of writing workshops and what to look for, the cost and who runs good ones?

Benefits

When I was first starting to write stories to submit to magazines, I think workshops helped me a lot. The ones I did as a student were back in the late 80s and 90s. They were really pre-web, pre-internet to a large extent, so they were one of the best ways to get information on what publishing was like, how to submit stor...

Writing Questions, et al

Does anybody want to do writing questions again? If anyone has a question about anything writing-related and/or publishing in general, or in particular, comment with it here and I'll answer it in a later post, if I know what the answer is.

I'm going to do a book recs post at some point, but first I need to finish all the books I'm reading, which include Clementine by Cherie Priest (airship pirates FTW) and Blameless by Gail Carriger and Bedlam by Laura Joh Rowland.

Am plugging away on the thir...