Forget selling. Focus on #writing.

Writers write, right?

M T McGuire Authorholic

A while back, I read this post, on Chuck Wendig’s blog and it got me thinking.

The basic gist is that there are gatekeepers for every writer. While, with indie publishing, it’s fairly easy to get your book out there, it gets much harder after publication than it is for trad published authors because most of the gates indies must go through turn up after the book is published.  So you get things like review sites that won’t touch anything self published; different gate, different place in the process but it’s still there. He explains how completely saturated the market is and links to an article from a fellow who has 150 books each day sent to his review magazine from trad publishers alone – which is why it only accepts trad pubbed books.

The message of Chuck’s article is, basically: there are gatekeepers in any part of the…

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Ten Tips for #NaNoWriMo

1 – Write like your ass is on fire and you are farting gasoline.

2 – Put the pedal to the metal and go. Writing a novel is nothing more than a road trip between “once upon a time” and “happy ever after”. The sooner you get there the sooner you are done.

3 – Don’t take any detours. Drive straight through just as fast as you can.

4 – Pour out your words with the pure and unbridled and whole-bellied honest velocity of a frat house kegger power-hurl. Vomit out that first draft. Blow great funky-chunks of prose all over the place. You can clean up your mess in December.

5 – Lay down words like you were a thunderstruck bricklayer building a life-size recreation of the Great Wall of China out of Lego building blocks and you possessed the keys to the Lego factory.

6 – Line up all of your apostrophes against a wall – (not the Great Wall – you are building that, remember?) – and shoot them full of bullet holes. Remember – “you’re” only counts as ONE word while “you are” counts as two.

7 – It helps to have a road map. Nail a big old sheet of poster board to the wall of your writing cave and scribble notes to every plot point you think of. Don’t trust your memory. Memory is a lying cad with unspoken dreams of political achievement – whose mouth runs in both directions at once.

8 – Don’t think too much. Just focus on remembering those two magic words “AND THEN”.

9 – Don’t let your face be seen on Facebook for the entire month of November. Leave the twittering to the birds. Unlink your LinkedIn and completely lose all Pinterest in posting pretty pictures. Time wasted is words poured needlessly down the drain-hole.

10 – Don’t ask me why I am writing this blog. I really ought to be writing right now.

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yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon