In The Forever War, I had fun writing about cooking under primitive conditions. It’s easy to write about because you don’t have to explain things so much. People understand cooking over a fire. When you start to go into cuisines, you risk losing your readers because the descriptions require too much detail, or it’s too gross.

Today’s guest blog post, from journalist Mridu Khullar Relph, explores the world of writing schemes and scams from an international perspective–something that’s increasingly an issue for Western writers looking to find work overseas.

I knew I’d found a keeper when my boyfriend-at-the-time barely flinched the first time he saw one of our fights, word-for-word, in print. “You writers,” he said. “You air your dirty laundry. That’s how it is.”

Bear, the award-winning science fiction and fantasy author and purveyor of the delicious salt caramels currently gracing my desk, knows that food and cooking are key to worldbuilding. In many of her 23 novels, you’ll find reference to, if not outright instructions for, how a particular culture feeds itself.

There’s a tendency for writers to obsess over rules. If you’re reading my blog series “Chasing the First Sale,” you know I’m the chiefest of sinners; it’s packed full of rules, and there’s a good reason for that: rules are helpful. They give shape to good tendencies and bad.

I’ve seen a slew of bad publishing contracts lately, which makes this guest blog post by author Kfir Luzatto especially resonant for me. Turning down a publishing offer when you have one in hand is one of the toughest decisions you will ever have to make…but sometimes, if the publisher has a poor reputation or the contract terms are bad, it’s the wise thing to do.

This year, Odyssey is offering three different online courses covering some of the most critical issues for developing writers.

On the heels of several publishers’ secret settlement deal with Google in the long-running Google Books lawsuit, a judge has made a major ruling in another lawsuit over book scanning.

If you’re a freelance writer, you’re probably under constant pressure to get the next paying gig and to keep the money flowing. This can override your caution and leave you vulnerable to scammers. I know, because I’ve been there myself.

A prominent literary agent recently told me that unless an author receives a hefty advance of $100,000 or more most publishers will do virtually no promotion, leaving it to authors to create and exploit their own platforms via social media and networking connections, workshops and webcasts.