Good morning, everyone. For those of you who are looking for Sarah’s pacing workshop, she asked me to let everyone know that she’ll pick it up again next weekend. This weekend she is away from the computer. Don’t worry, she’s fine and so are the rest of the family.
So I’m going to throw the floor open. All things publishing are fair game. Just no politics please.
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “Sunday morning announcements”
I was reading “Ask a Wendigo” (meaning Chuck Wendig’s blog), where in his July 3 post he talked about his daily writing habits. A fan asked about how much he wrote each day to produce his novels. He answered, but he also sidestepped and suggested that the proper question rather than ‘how long should it take to write a story’ should be ‘how long should it take to become a storyteller.’
My general impression is that is as soon as you start trying to tell a story you are a storyteller and that it isn’t a good idea to ever stop trying to be a better storyteller. What do you all think?
Yes, being able to tell a story is the foundation, whether the story is oral, written or acted. Improving your storytelling is always good.
Of course, one must also practice and improve on the specific skills needs for the medium one chooses. But if there isn’t a story, all the perfect puctuation and good grammar is wasted.
I read somewhere (I think in an actual printed writing book) that that particular author thought it should take just four years of dedicated effort to go from decent grammar to decent storyteller where decent was defined as something that would sell to readers once a traditional publisher picked up that author. I would like to believe him, but I am not sure that I do. I have no idea how you accurately predict what readers will and will not consider good. Tastes vary so much. It seems like the only thing you can do I write stories that you love and possibly tailor your writing to the subset of what you love and several of your close friends also love. I’m not sure if that second bit is necessarily worth working towards, though.
Taste matters less than it used to. IIRC (and I can’t find the article right now) Dean Wesley Smith pointed out that with e-publishing, things that Traditional Publishers wouldn’t touch were now available to everyone. And that a tiny share of the whole potential market was actually quite huge in absolute numbers.
But they still need a good story and reasonably good language skills, to get recommended.
I’m finding it facinating how quickly the tablet/ereader/smartphone hardware is evolving. Every few months a new group comes out with better hardware and lower price.
Kindles dropped in price by 80% in 4 years while getting much much better specs.
Google just released a 7″ tablet with specs better than an iPad2 (as good as a 3 in some areas) and dominating the 7″ Kindle Fire 1 (the fire2 is rumored to be around the corner) for only 200$ last month.
A new generation of android smartphones comes out every 3 to 6 mnths depending on the maker.
And they have started to come out with tablets like the Asus Transformer line that have attachable decent keyboards that are also screeen covers and extra batteries. My cousin just bought one last week and its just about as comfortable to type on as most laptops I’ve used and has a 16hour batter life with the keyboard cover attached.
At the office we are seriously thinking about replacing big printed binders of training materials for the missionaries with 200$ tablets and are wondering if our next laptop replacement cycle for the office staff in 2 years will be tablets ala the Transformer line.
Oh and this whole comment has been written on a 1.5 year old smartphone that has mostly replaced my laptop for general internet use.