It makes no difference that I’ve been a computer programmer for nearly 30 years now. There are computer programmers and there are computer programmers. If your assignments (actual or potential) don’t require you to use a given technology, chances are you’ll never learn that technology. Meanwhile, the world passes you by in the form of [...]

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My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman [...]

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Back in May — the 26th, to be exact — Steve King’s invaluable and always entertaining Today in Literature newsletter informed us that on that day in 1891, Edith Wharton’s first story was accepted for publication, by Scribner’s Magazine. The story was called “Mrs. Manstey’s View.”
(Yes, by the way: that’s accepted for publication — not [...]

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Yesterday I went into a soapbox-lecture rant, shall we say? (yes, let’s — rants seem to be another thing that’s done a lot), about some of the comments to a recent post on Nathan Bransford’s blog.
At the end of every week, Bransford posts a “This Week in Publishing” entry summing up recent industry news and [...]

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I hate that question. (I hate a lot of questions, grump that I am.) There’s no easy way to answer it, really — not just me, for Merry-Go-Round, but a lot of other writers, for their books. After you’ve spent months or years ensuring that it would be about something, when somebody asks the question [...]

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It seems to be the thing to do, these days, to actually just go ahead and post an excerpt of one’s current work-in-progress (”progress” in either the actual writing or in the getting-it-to-market senses).
So then. Here goes…
Prologue
Maroon-proof. Mikey would wonder about that for a long time. It barely sounded like English.

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Since I started working on Merry-Go-Round last August, I’ve been sticking more or less to the same morning routine: shut off alarm (which goes off between 4 and 5am); stagger into the bathroom — the path illuminated, faintly, by a night light; slip back into the bedroom (carefully, mustn’t awaken The slumbering Missus); grope around [...]

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Regarding the entry I just posted, and the references therein to neurotic uncertainty over whether a book is DONE, this quote from William Strunk, Jr. (the original author of the classic Elements of Style):
It is worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.
Boy, do I hope so. :)

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Funny thing about writing a book — at least if you’re neurotic enough (and I am that neurotic): you never really know if it’s DONE. The best you can hope for is that it’s done enough.
Last week, right around now, I was exulting about having completed the “final” draft of Merry-Go-Round. I certainly didn’t have [...]

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One of the hardest — yet most important — questions an author often has to answer about his work is the one asked by this entry’s title.
Now, it’s not hard at all to answer, for many authors and even more books. When you walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble, when you browse Amazon, it’s [...]

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