We Write!
Alma T. C. Boykin I confess, I no longer read thrillers. I used to read Frederick Foresyth, (Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File), Alistair Maclean* (Goodby California, The Satan Bug, The Guns of Navarone) and novels like The Wild Geese, Hunt for Red October, and so on. At some point, I either lost my... Continue Reading →
A comment from an Indy writer on Twitter caught my attention. She had just got a quote for editing her book. $6500. Was this reasonable? I asked the question: did she have any real idea how much she was likely to earn from her book? (I was not being nasty and all of this was... Continue Reading →
Alma T. C. Boykin In the beginning, there was fiction and nonfiction. Mostly. Ish. Sort of. If you didn't look too hard. And all was good, and all authors lived in harmony with their publishers, and it was Very Good. But then a marketing agent sidled up to Eve and said, "Psssssst, wanna get more... Continue Reading →
Alma T. C. Boykin No, not the year 2022, although I've got mixed emotions about seeing it leave. It wasn't the best of years for me personally, but it was much, much better than several that come to mind. I was thinking about the ten years since I released my first fiction book, A Cat... Continue Reading →
I recently came across a series of tweets by Sergej Sumlenny, discussing how Russia had used books, as well as other entertainment media, to prepare its citizens for war in general, prior to its invasion of Ukraine. Here's an excerpt from Threadreader's aggregation of the tweets. Let's start a long thread about how Russian book... Continue Reading →
About that "most books only sell 12 copies" bunkum, which from all accounts runs perilously close to perjury... it's statistics that have been mangled worse than most of the folks I see in physical therapy, here's a look at what's behind the smokescreen. Courtesy of J.L. Curtis, We can find a lot more information at... Continue Reading →
I'm not asking for me, here. I'm pretty sure that ten years, ten novels, and countless short stories into this, I'm an author. No, it's a question I'm not being asked directly. It's been a privilege, in doing the anthologies this last year, to include stories from a number of new authors in the mix.... Continue Reading →
So a while back (a few months) I decided I'd pick up the gauntlet that had been thrown regarding a hunting anthology. The challenge involved is a simple one: hunting stories tend to be short. Like... really short. Of the submissions in my spreadsheet I have one that weighs in at a hundred words. Balance... Continue Reading →
How do you define WIP? Yes, I know the acronym stands for "work in progress", but how do you define progress? Have you ever stopped to relate that to your actual workflow? This question brought to you by a friend who was spinning herself up into an anxiety attack with heaps of unnecessary guilt and... Continue Reading →
I missed this article when it was published last December, but it came up during an Internet discussion this week: Is Superman Circumcised? wins Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year I did a double-take when I saw it, and looked it up to confirm what seemed an impossibly weird headline. Sure enough,... Continue Reading →
Mad Genius Club 