Posts by accordingtohoyt

Reading Authors

The customary idiocy is doing the rounds of Facebook again.  All about reading authors that aren’t white males.

I don’t know about you, but not being a roman augur, I don’t read authors, I read books.  I never learned to read entrails, and besides, it’s probably illegal.  Or at least would get me an angry letter from the SPCA.

Seriously now, don’t I think that the author’s biography and his and her background influence how and what they write? Don’t I want to read new and fresh things? Read more

Your Authentic Voice

One of the things I used to strain about a lot was “authentic voice.”

No, I’m not talking about the mentally challenged idea you can only write the cultural background you come from, which is akin to the idea you can only wear Halloween costumes that match your external appearance.  (I have a guest post about this on my blog today.) Why mentally challenged?  Because it’s a confusion of genes and culture.  Sure, they can be and often are coincidental due to the fact most countries in the world are tribal.  But anyone who has immigrated and acculturated, and well… practically anyone in America, should be aware that just because they’re often covalent it doesn’t mean they’re the same. The idea they’re the same is actually incredibly racist and fuel for eugenics.  So I’m not at home to that particular form of mentally challenged confusion.  Read more

You Haven’t Lost It

Recently I had to reassure one of my fledgelings — one of the early ones, now very much a master herself — that she hadn’t “lost it.”

What is “it” you ask?  It is the ability to write.

This is a perennial and bizarre fear of all writers. I suspect half of you suffer from this. We take a month off — say, to refinish furniture (it’s research, okay? It has now given rise to Busted Marble, Stenciled Murder and Chalked off soon to be visited upon Dyce Dare as soon as A Well Inlaid Death is Finished.  Yes, sure, some stuff needed done around here, but we probably could have waited a year and paid. OTOH I was too far from furniture refinishing to fully get in the mind of someone who does it for a living.  So…) — and then we come back, write and become convinced it’s all wrong, miles, and miles of wrongitude, and we’ll never write anything worth reading again.

Read more

Primordial Threat

I don’t normally write posts to push someone else’s book, least of all if they’re not a close friend.

This post merits attention for another reasons: someone found a way to get around my “I don’t have time to read your books” (which is not an excuse, but the absolute truth.  I’m now falling down in my duty as a mentor to several people, including husband and soon to be daughter in law.) He sent me an audio book. So take this as read that I’m slightly influenced towards him by being given an audio book. Read more

Cookies

There are handicaps I labor under as a writer.  Okay, the gentleman that just said lack of native talent can stay after class to clean the blackboards.  It’s probably true mind you but not as important as most people think.  My life, from learning foreign languages to writing is a testimony to the fact that a sufficient amount of hard work can overcome any lack of native talent.

No, my big handicap is that there were so few genres I loved as a kid.  Or perhaps I should say so few subgenres. Read more

Booooooooooring

I confess I have a problem with … well, life in general.  I bore easily.  This is why I have about ten different projects started (I do usually finish them one bit at a time.) and write and read in many different genres.  I also do things like walk away from boring conversations before I realize I’m doing it.

And some years ago I started doing that with books.  Not just “worthy” books, though that was a great part of it, but also (even) my popcorn books.  The last big batch of mysteries I bought used before I went fully electronic for fiction were mostly unread.  Not unopened, but I realized halfway through reading (I thought) one of them that I’d actually been reading two of them and they were so similar I didn’t notice until  it hit me the names were wrong.  (I had one in the bedroom and one in the bathroom, and since folding down a corner gives husband cold sweats, and I can never find bookmarks, I was finding the page by memory.) Read more

When You Fall

This writing thing is not precisely scary.  I mean, you’re never going to break a leg.  Or two.  Or freeze working out in the snow, because you are just too tired to walk back home.

And yet… and yet sometimes you fall and you can’t get up. Read more