New Publisher Listing: Mensch Publishing
firstwriter.com – Thursday August 18, 2022
No mission statement nor other worthy but meaningless platitudes. Its aim is simply to help authors reach readers with minimal intervention and maximum impact and to reward them proportionately.
Writing a Romance versus Writing a Mystery
crimereads.com – Wednesday August 17, 2022
Is there that big a difference between falling in love and solving a murder?
Um, yes, there is, especially when writing about love and murder. For me, it’s not just about content but about the craft and process of writing in those separate genres. I find it fascinating that although I’ve been writing for over twenty years, my beginning process for writing cozy mysteries is vastly different than it is for writing in the romance genre.
I started writing romances because I love to read them. It’s not a billion dollar industry for nothing! Comprised of formulaic and original plots, as well as a guaranteed happily ever after (HEA,) the genre breeds voracious readers who want engaging lead characters, a romantic main plot, and that all-important HEA (or HFN—happily for now, which has become accepted in the genre.)
New Publishing Imprint Listing: Red Feather
firstwriter.com – Wednesday August 17, 2022
Seeks to create groundbreaking sacred tools with a purpose that are made with pride, giving honor to the subject matter of each and every project.
New Magazine Listing: Shorts Magazine
firstwriter.com – Wednesday August 17, 2022
Online magazine published four times a year, and includes short fiction, flash fiction, sci-fi, life writing, poetry, essays, science, research, opinion pieces, monologues, drama, top ten lists, photography, featured artists.
New Literary Agent Listing: Beniamino Ambrosi
firstwriter.com – Wednesday August 17, 2022
Represents English-language nonfiction and literary fiction, and authors in translation.
New Magazine Listing: The Soho Review
firstwriter.com – Tuesday August 16, 2022
Humor magazine based in New York. Constantly looking for jokes, cartoons, poems, and short stories. Pitch ideas by email.
Unwritten — The crisis in creative writing
honisoit.com – Monday August 15, 2022
When she sat down to craft her debut novel in 2020’s lockdown, months after finishing her undergraduate degree, Diana Reid had never considered a career in writing before. An incisive debut about the interplay of sexuality, feminism, and power at an Australian university campus, Love and Virtue (2021) surfaced to overflowing critical acclaim and was named Book of the Year by the Australian publishing industry in June.
But, in hindsight, it very well might not have been written.
“It kind of terrifies me, actually,” Reid says. “I was so dependent on this very freak circumstance [lockdown] before I actually sat down and opened a blank word document.”
Writers and Liars: On Fact, Fiction, and Truth
lithub.com – Sunday August 14, 2022
I’ve often heard authors say that fiction is merely lies. George R. R. Martin has said that “we’re writing about people who never existed and events that never happened…[a]ll those things are essentially untrue.” Norman Spinrad characterizes these fictional lies as differentiating the genre from “biography, history, or reportage.” The list of writers with this viewpoint goes on and on. There’s even a fiction writing group, for whom I once had the pleasure of being a guest speaker, called the Pocono Liars Club.
It’s not hard to understand this perspective. As a novelist, I do make things up for a living. But I believe the job of the author is to tell emotional truths, and that the best way to do that is rarely by relaying facts and figures or repeating events just as they happened. Journalism and documentaries have an important place and often use the same toolbox as fiction does, however, fiction is uniquely suited to truth-telling because humans have storytelling baked into our DNA. We understand the world best through stories, and these are an incredible way to arrive at something approaching a universal truth.
Why We Need Independent Publishers
newsletters.theatlantic.com – Tuesday August 9, 2022
Along with most everyone I know who works in or otherwise relies on book publishing for their livelihood, I’ve been following the Biden administration’s antitrust case against the proposed Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger. Last week, as John H. Maher of Publishers Weekly live-tweeted us through the opening days of the trial, my timeline was filled with [skull-emoji] quote-tweets of things that many of us aren’t used to hearing folks in publishing say out loud. PRH lawyers have argued that “after the merger, the market dynamic will be just the same,” while the DOJ maintains that combining two of the “Big Five” publishers into one would decrease the number of offers an author might receive, lower book advances, and make it harder for writers to support themselves. In a pretrial brief, the DOJ stated that if the merger goes forward, it “would … give the merged company control of nearly half of the market to acquire anticipated top-selling books from authors”—a point underlined by Stephen “My name is Stephen King, I’m a freelance writer” King when he took the stand last Tuesday. “Consolidation is bad for competition,” he said.
8 Steps to Follow When Writing an Early Death Scene
nofilmschool.com – Tuesday August 9, 2022
Do you want a supporting character's death to be impactful? Then follow these steps!
The fourth season of Netflix's Stranger Things introduced many new characters that we quickly learned to love or despise. While many side characters feel like archetypes rather than fully formed characters, one stands above the rest because of how impactful her story and death were.
Although Chrissy Cunningham’s (Grace Van Dien) story is incredibly short, lasting only a single episode, her impact on the main characters and viewers was undeniable. In five scenes, the audience empathized with Chrissy’s trauma and hardships and even swooned over her blossoming friendship with Eddie (Joseph Quinn), all to watch her die a horrific death.
How did the writers maximize Chrissy’s story to get such a high emotional payoff with her death scene? Schnee breaks down what to focus on when writing an early death scene that has a lingering effect on the rest of the main story, and how you can approach an early death in your next project.
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