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What do you do if you discover that you’ve made one huge mistake?
I’m closing in on the completion of the first draft of my novel, and I have finally, definitively realized that I made one huge mistake in my plotting. I revealed a secret too soon, and as a result...
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“The Portal” is now $1.99 at Barnes & Noble!
Marked down from $4.99 — such a deal! Amazon will be forced to follow suit when it sees the hordes of ebook buyers deserting it when they hear about the new price. This gives me an excuse to reprint...
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Why Barnes & Noble keeps offering to sell me a book I wrote
As I described here, I’ve been baffled by why Barnes & Noble keeps showing me ads that include a book I wrote. I was finally smart enough to track this down and, as people suggested, it has to do...
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Print on Demand reaches “Lore of the Underlings”
My friend John Klobucher has created an interesting fantasy universe in his episodic series Lore of the Underlings. He has now collected the first set of episodes in old-fashioned book form: Print...
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Publishers as gatekeepers
One of the arguments made on behalf of mainstream publishers in the Amazon-Hachette war is that publishers act as gatekeepers — keeping the junk out of the market and using their editorial skills to...
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Draft 3 of my novel is complete — am I done yet?
Probably not. But at least now I have a draft I can give to folks without having to apologize and explain about all the stuff I’m going to fix, really, no foolin’, I know I didn’t explain what...
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“Replica” is now free in England and Canada!
I seem to have some readers there. In England, it’s #7 among technothrillers on Amazon. In Canada, it’s #8. You still have to pay for it in Australia, alas. Here’s a nice short review that just...
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“Shared Notes & Highlights” for Dover Beach
How come I never noticed Amazon’s “Shared Notes & Highlights” section before? According to Amazon, these are “the thoughts and passages that Kindle readers have shared while reading this book.”...
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Faulkner on inspiration
Two of my favorite writing quotations come from William Faulkner: I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning. And in a similar vein: I don’t know anything...
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Why Amazon is not a monopoly
Franklin Foer of The New Republic has joined the ranks of folks with Amazon Derangement Syndrome; take a look at this article. The best response I’ve seen is this blog post at the Washington Post (now...
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The hardest thing about writing fiction…
. . . is transitions. I have spent most of the day getting my characters from one place to another. They were doing something interesting in the place they left. I am confident that they’ll do...
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Eternity’s End
My friend Jeff Carver has been running a highly successful BookBub promotion of his epic Nebula-nominated science-fiction novel Eternity’s End. Only 99 cents! But hurry–this is the sale’s final...
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Books I read in 2014
Some of them, anyway, and in no particular order. A couple others I’ve talked about previously. King Leopold’s Ghost — This harrowing book, about the Belgian colonization of the Congo, is depressing...
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Building worlds, and remembering them
A while back I told a friend of mine that I was working on the third book in my Last P.I. series (it’s called Where All the Ladders Start and it will be available incredibly soon now). He asked me,...
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My new novel “Where All the Ladders Start” is available now!
My new novel Where All the Ladders Start is out on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and other fine ebook retailers. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, it’s the third book in...
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So that’s what my novel is all about!
When I’m writing a novel, there usually comes a point when I realize what it’s all about. Not the details of the plot–working them out is a constant process–but the reason I’m bothering to write it....
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Diagramming the first sentences of famous novels
For Christmas one of my sons gave me a wonderful present–a poster showing the grammatical diagrams of the opening sentences of some famous novels. What a kid! Here’s a column about this poster.titled...
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Clickbait titles for classic novels
This Buzzfeed listicle is kind of funny (and kind of meta for Buzzfeed). Here are a couple of examples that I like: And:
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What makes a plot “arthritic”?
In my post on Ann Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread I quoted the Washington Post’s assessment (at the beginning of a rave review) that its plot was “arthritic” I don’t know what that means. Presumably...
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The Wright Brothers
I have it on good authority that David McCullough is moving to my little town, which will cause the mean income of town authors to increase by approximately eleventy billion percent. His latest book,...
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