Category: General
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Good Agent, Bad Agent
Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a really brilliant un-agented, unpublished writer and you’ve recently finished final edits on a truly brilliant novel. Yesterday you queried a bunch of agents and today you got five “The Call” calls. Don’t laugh. We’re playing “let’s pretend,” remember? How do you decide which agent will share 15…
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When Editors Go Bad
If you’ve been reading my little blog for any length of time, you already know that editors aren’t prefect. [Yes, I just wrote “prefect.” Squirming yet?] As evidence of this, I present to you some of the most common mistakes editors make. By “editors” I mean me. And by “mistakes” I mean errors in judgment…
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10 Reasons You Don’t Have an Agent
Your writing is unremarkable. You may have worked hard to craft a good story, followed all the rules – trimming unnecessary prepositional phrases, chopping adverbs, replacing passive verbs with active verbs – but the result is indistinguishable from any of a hundred other novels the agent has reviewed in the past month. Solution: Find your…
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Put Down Your Red Stapler and Go Home. It’s Friday.
Three things. Uno – The “First and Last” contest is coming to a close tonight at midnight… but if you ask really nicely, I might let you finish your story over the weekend. Here’s a link to the contest info. And thanks to all who have already entered. So far, nearly 20 of you have…
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Thursday
Just a reminder about tomorrow’s contest deadline. Yup. That’s all I’m giving you today. Well, that and this link to an MSNBC article on why we get lost in a good book. Feel free to use the comments section to tell me what you think. Tomorrow I’ll have a typical Friday grab-bag of random tidbits.…
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910 Words About Word Count
Okay, let’s do the math. (Approximate word counts noted.) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling – 257,000 words. The Stand, Stephen King – 464,000 words. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy – 560,000 words. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway – 68,000 words. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury – 46,000 words. The Color…
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More Friday Miscellany
Welcome to another weekend edition of Noveldoctor.com. Today? Five random things. Item the First – Tomorrow evening, the Christy Award ceremonies will be held in Denver. The Christy Awards are given to celebrate and promote the best of Christian fiction. A novel I edited, Safe at Home, by Richard Doster, is one of three nominees…