Publishing - Page 2 of 3

Post date August 27, 2017
Categories Publishing, Writing

Writing Insights Part Four: Publishing Your Book

You’ve decided you want to be a writer. You’ve banged out a rough draft. After a dozen passes, you’re starting to think any more edits will mar its perfection. Now what? Welcome to my fourth and final(?) part of this series on writing insights, where I go over all the things I wish I’d known about publishing a book before I became a writer. Before I begin, it bears mentioning that I’ve written more on this topic than any other. My blog is one long history of writing about publishing,…

Post date August 23, 2017
Categories Publishing, Writing

Writing Insights Part Two: The Rough Draft

In the first part of this series, I listed some of the insights I wish I’d known before I set out to become a writer. Those insights might not be equally useful to all people, and that same warning applies here as we dive into the writing process. I’m sharing these simply because I think my twenty years of fruitless endeavors might’ve been a whole lot easier if I’d known a few things before I got started. To me, the rough draft is the most difficult part of the writing…

Post date August 20, 2017
Categories Popular, Publishing, Writing

Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer

I started writing my first novel when I was twelve years old. I was thirty-three when I completed my first rough draft. That’s twenty years of wanting to do something and not knowing how. Twenty years of failure and frustrations and giving up. A big part of the problem is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know which questions to ask, much less who might have the answers. These days, people write to me as if I know what I’m doing. Or like I have a…

Post date October 26, 2016
Categories Publishing

Imagine Dragons and Beacon 23

The first time I heard the Imagine Dragons song Radioactive, I dreamed of a collaboration. Their hit single came out in 2012, at the same time WOOL was taking off. Every time I heard the song play I imagined the credits to the film rolling while Radioactive blared from theater speakers. It’s a song you sing at the top of your lungs; a song you scream. The tone is as perfect as the lyrics: a mix of sonorous and sad with hard-hitting and angry. It feels like a revolution song, a desperation song, a…

Post date September 1, 2016
Categories AI, Publishing, Writing

This is Only the Beginning

I want you to do me a favor and watch these two trailers for the same film: I know which one I like better. The first trailer captures the mood, while the second tries to give us the plot. As someone who now avoids movie trailers, because I’d rather watch the 120 minute version of the film rather than the 3 minute version, the first trailer is exactly what I’ve been begging Hollywood to give me for well over a decade. Only, Hollywood didn’t give me the first trailer. IBM’s…