Posts by accordingtohoyt

It’s Human, But Is It Art?

As most of you know I have no claims to being an artist engaging in art.  What I do might be art — who am I to judge? — but art is something you can strive for not something you can volitionally do.

An artist is what you are, a craft is what you do.  Since I can’t garantee I’m an artist — it seems to me an artist wouldn’t have made every possible mistake and have had to learn things twice, uphill, in snow, both ways — I try to improve my craft, and study constantly to be the best craftswoman I can be.

So, what is art, precisely?

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A new policy for attending cons by John Ringo

 A new policy for attending cons by John Ringo

Stop Clawing

When I came into publishing 20 years ago, publishing was an oligopsony.

Not literally, of course.  there are relatively few capable of producing competent books (by competent I mean that a substantial portion of the population will enjoy reading, and maybe want more of) compared to a multitude of potential readers.

The problem was to get at the potential readers, you needed to go through a very few “buyers” — aka publishing houses — which had become even fewer in the decade and a half I’d been trying to sell to them.  So the field was an oligopsony in fact if not in theory. Read more

Book out

Sorry guys.  For various reasons, I have slept about three hours.  I’m going back to bed, but I have a book out this week, so I’ll do that.

Lewis and Clark in the Arcane Territories

Kevin J. Anderson

Sarah A. Hoyt

When Halley’s Comet was destroyed above our Earth in May, 1759, so was our old way of life, along with the natural science I had studied so intently. The Sundering did just as its name suggests: it sundered the Old World from the New. Read more

Assumptions of superiority

So today I was reading an article on how publishing and its sensitivity readers, and its “non cultural appropriation” editors have stifled literary creativity and turned storytelling into a hellish post-apocalyptic landscape in which nothing grows, and certainly not imagination or feeling.

I was reading and sort of nodding along — sort of? well, they seem to think that traditional publishing is the only game in town, when they decided it was time to establish their intellectual superiority.

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Getting Real

When I was a young writer (sung to the tune of “when he was a young warthog”) and we rented our first house, the landlord who was maybe all of five years older than us (maybe 28) asked my profession.

Since at the time I did not have a job, I told him none.  He asked me what I did all day, and my husband told him I wrote novels.  The landlord insisted on putting down “writer” as my profession, which embarrassed me mortally, since I didn’t think I was one/hadn’t done anything to deserve being called that.  Or at least so I thought. Read more

Write What Scares You

In real life I’m a weirdly wired person, one of those who, in the time of hunter gatherers would have been called “sabertooth lunch.”  By which I mean I run towards that which scares me.  (This almost killed me a couple of times.  But it might have saved my life another couple of times.  So on the whole it’s neutral.)

In writing OTOH I’m the greatest wuss that ever lived.  Oh, not about writing death and blood and violence.  I can do those, though I’m just learning to write them well.  About writing emotion.

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