Perseverance plays an important role in successful blogging. There will be days you don’t feel like writing or don’t feel like you have anything to say. But writing is a discipline and requires pushing through and writing anyway. Excellence requires commitment.
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So the question I have been mulling for the last couple of months (but not for the first time) is whether to keep blogging or call it quits after 14 years. I think I want to give at least one more try at making it work. Let me give you some insight into why.
Continue readingThe problem, you see, is that people who don’t write books don’t know what an unending, unyielding ass-ache they are. I’d compare them to a non-stop flight in a middle seat between John Goodman’s sweaty former body double who’s now jobless because he “let himself go” and a runny-nosed, cotton-candy-loving small child who is hard to distinguish from a deadly pathogen vector.
But I can’t make that comparison — because writing a book is worse than that. You see there’s nothing “non-stop” about writing a book save the constant yearning to either reach the destination or the unending sound of the siren on your shoulder counseling you to give up and beach the ship. Even though you’re often surrounded by people, you’re always alone in that community-of-one called “the author of your unfinished book.”
It’s more like a years-long journey with constant layovers, cancelled planes, and rerouting through Newark. Every time you push away from the keyboard, it’s like deplaning just long enough to see if Wolfgang Puck Express has finally decided to more accurately rename itself “Bowel Stewery on the Go.”
I know what you’re thinking right now: “Stewery isn’t a word.” To which I ask, “That’s your objection to this rant?”
In the second part of our conversation Olen Steinhauer and I discuss the life of an expatriate and its impact on your perspective toward your own and other cultures, the future of publishing, and his plans for the future, among other things.
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One of my favorite authors, Olen Steinhauer, has a book coming out in 2014, The Cairo Affair, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
In the mean time, listen to Olen discuss where he gets ideas, the challenges of writing and what he would do if he wasn’t an author.
Jane Friedman has a helpful post, and a handy infographic, on what she sees as “the key 5 publishing paths, their value to authors, the potential pitfalls, and examples of each.”
Continue reading“For me writing is a long process of wandering and getting lost. I have no sense at all, setting out, what I am going to write. I think that will always, more or less, be the nature of my process.”
Continue readingInteresting piece on how author Andy Ferguson (Crazy U, Land of Lincoln) ended up writing political journalism: Andy Ferguson never wanted to be a writer. Not when he was growing up outside Chicago. His dream was to be a rock star. “I wanted to be one of the Beatles,” Ferguson said. “Then it turned out they… Continue reading
A Q&A with young adult author Richard Lewis touching on his books, writing, publishing, surfing and more.
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