Kate McIntyre's Blog, page 9

C: Clean Reader, or, the c-word and when I used it

There’s been a lot of talk in the publishing community lately about a new app called “Clean Reader.” Clean Reader can be installed onto tablets and phones, and it replaces profanities in most ebook formats with “cleaner” versions of words. Some of these censored words are unarguably offensive (fuck.) Other words seem old-fashioned to remove (damn.) And some are downright bizarre (breast.) But what all these words have in common, from the objectively dirty to the puritanically outlandish, is t...

Getting Out of the Labyrinth: Part 7 – Waiting

At the end of last week’s blog in this series, Querying, I said it was the second hardest step of the whole process. This week, we’re going to talk about the absolute worst of them all:

Waiting.

Once you’ve signed with an agent, there’s the expectation that it’s all easy from there. It’s not. Not by a long shot. This is the phase when your new agent who you hopefully just love starts pitching your books to their connections in the industry. I remember that first week so well, sitting there sq...

B: Being God and Building a World

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write something that doesn’t involve some kind of world-creation.

I think it’s the worlds more than anything else that makes fantasy what it is. It’s not the magic or the quests or the hundreds and thousands of tropes. To me, a good world is a character, and getting to know that character is one of my absolute favourite parts of enjoying any fiction. That one all-defining character who wraps literally everything else up inside herself is fantasy to me.

There...

A: Art is Hard

I think I’m naturally inclined to appreciate art.

All of it, really. I’m moved by pretty much everything. Dance, theatre, writing, music, all forms of art media, film, television… I can find art in flower arrangements and shed a silly little tear. There’s just something about creativity, creating something with merit from nothing at all… it gets to me!

And I think it’s natural to admire and desire what we appreciate. Just as I’ve never seen a form of art that I don’t marvel at, I’ve never see...

My A-Z Blogging Challenge Topic List!

Yes, I know! I’m posting this very late! But it’s still Wednesday here, and I’m going to have my first entry up by the end us the day, mark my words!

Here are my topics for the A-Z Blogging challenge, which I’ll be participating in throughout the month of April. I’m looking forward to getting to know other participants, and to exercising my brevity muscle, which is… mildly atrophied!

April 01, Wednesday – Art is Hard
April 02, Thursday – Being God and Building a World
April 03, Friday – Clean...

Getting Out of the Labyrinth: Part 6 – Submission

Now we’re getting into the professional stuff. By the time you start submitting, I’d say you’re mostly out of the Labyrinth. But it’s still looming behind you, and in front of you is a whole new wasteland… the marketplace.

The whole game changes when you start submitting your book to agents. It’s super scary and intimidating because this is probably the first time your book is going into the hands of a stranger who will judge it. That stranger isn’t just a potential hater – they hold your fra...

Getting Out of the Labyrinth: Part 5 – Editing

A new week, another step forward on our series about The Labryinth! This week we’re talking about what might me the most scary of the steps, editing.

i prefer barefoot.

Before you even start on the editing process, you need to give yourself time to celebrate. You just wrote a book. Not a 12-year-old scribbling in a notebook. Not a really long fanfiction. An honest to goodness book that you pulled up out of your brilliant mind and made into reality. Take a few days. Go out to dinner with frien...

Getting Out of the Labyrinth: Part 4 – Writing 2.0

I’ve been writing up a storm on the sequel to The Deathsniffer’s Assistant, my debut novel, in the last few weeks. Taking time to blog about the Labyrinth has seemed so hard when I’ve been just chewing through words! But the more I’ve written, the more I’ve thought about writing and how much I’ve learned. I really wanted to talk more about the process of writing before I moved on to editing.

Well, lucky for me! I went to check my schedule, and as it turns out, I was so excited to get to my ad...

My Influence Map

I’ve taken a short break from my Labyrinth series while I’ve been hard at work on my second book, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to blog about! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my map of influences. I think that we creative-types can trace our particular formula to a set of ingredients that, when mixed with our unique and stunning personalities, makes our creative footprint.

Different people at different times are influenced by different things. And I am very much a product of my t...

Getting Out of the Labyrinth: Part 3 – Writing

This is a continuation of my series on The Labyrinth, that monstrous impossible maze so many of us writers get stuck in during our inbetween years. In the last few weeks, I talked about planning and outlining and the things that I personally learned while going through those steps with my first novel (The Deathsniffer’s Assistant, available this summer!)

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It’s the big one!

I can’t say that I had fun writing The Deathsniffer’s Assistant. Not exactly. Now, don’t take that wrong. Parts of it were...