SFWA member @blakecharlton's novelette "Endosymbiont" is on Escape Pod. http://bit.ly/hVpjaI # SFWA member @alcole123 asks HOW MANY AGENTS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW A WRITER? New Hollywood MisAdventure: http://is.gd/YgVRhD # SFWA member @catvalente announces her candidacy for Eastern Regional Director of SFWA. # @cathshaffer You are in the South/Central region. Lee Martindale is the S/C […]

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

Today, author Marian Perera reviews a book I often recommend for writers who are interested in learning the basics of self-protection in the shark-infested waters of writing and publishing: The Street-Smart…

In my last two posts I discussed the fact that readers are not going to hope and fear for a character unless that character raises their sympathy and sense of deservingness. But is that enough? Do readers stick around if the characters are utterly boring?

New language in the termination provision of the Harper’s boilerplate gives them the right to cancel a contract if “Author’s conduct evidences a lack of due regard for public conventions and morals, or if Author commits a crime or any other act that will tend to bring Author into serious contempt, and such behavior would materially damage the Work’s reputation or sales.”

Rob Horning in The New Inquiry says publishers will not only use data collected from eReaders to track your buying habits, they’ll use it to track your reading habits. Did you skip to the end of the book? They’ll know. Did you give up on page 28? They’ll know.

A teenager is inherently an outsider, because they’re in transition, unformed, changing quickly from childhood to adulthood. They’ve been given a lot of cultural freedom as a child, because they are children. You often hear people say, “They don’t understand, they’re just children,” and this is often an excuse for breaking some minor cultural prohibition.

Industry News and Member News for Will McIntosh, Joanne Merriam, Maureen K. Power, and Anne M. Pillsworth.

Angry Robot will be accepting unagented manuscripts for the month of March, 2011. http://is.gd/jnBbB #

Since I so often get questions about the legitimacy of literary contests (see, for instance, my posts of December 16 and December 7), I thought it would be helpful to post some suggestions for evaluating any contests you may be thinking of entering.

Blogger JM contacted one hundred literary agents with the following question: What is the single biggest mistake writers make when querying you? More than 50 responded. Here are the problems mentioned most frequently:
Blogger JM contacted one hundred literary age…