 |
| Photo by me. I’m on Instagram here. |
The! Past! Few! Weeks! In! Books!
Lots and lots and lots of good stuff. Let’s get started.
Should books come out faster? The idea has long taken hold with self-publishing, but it’s percolating elsewhere. Even traditional publishing imprints are experimenting with releasing series as fast as possible.
Are you putting off reading the rest of this article? Maybe this is why.
My good friend Sarah McCarry, aka The Rejectionist, has continued her incredible interviews with writers who are navigating depression. The latest: Elia Osuna, Litsa Dremousis, Jacqui Morton, Katherine Locke, B R Sanders, Roxane Gay, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Soren Melville. Must read, all of them.
Meanwhile, in other The Rejectionist news, she wrote an incredibly thought-provoking article arguing that recent dystopian fiction avoids current realities relating to race and gender violence.
In still other The Rejectionist news, a field guide to The Unlikable Female Protagonist.
Is this the year’s most mind-expanding book around gender?
Anne Rice has joined the fight against author harassment on Amazon.
Are you interested in writing a picture book? Here are six tips.
Amtrak has launched a seriously awesome plan to start a writer’s residency program. However, as Author Beware notes, there are things you should know.
Stephen King: The adverb is not your friend.
And finally, this is the only article about The Bachelor that you need to read. Which is really saying something.
Have a good weekend!!
I found myself clicking on most of the links. Was it just me or was this an exceptionally great batch? Tagged a few books I want to read from the Mind-Expanding Gender link. I've been on a book lull, so thanks!
These are all great links today. I've seen the Atlantic story before and it actually shed some light into my perennial procrastination (which for me feels more like stage fright than procrastination – ironically, I don't actually have stage fright onstage!). Anyone who has a hard time getting up the nerve to work on their projects needs to check it out – and explore further.
Anything that links to Sarah three times is worth its weight.
Good links – thank you! The procrastination article resonated; partly b/c I do it and partly b/c I want to raise my kids better. Thanks for the round-up!
Great links, except… Argghh, not another adverb diatribe! I've watched way too many novice writers become convinced that Adverb Prohibition is law. They'll read one of these articles and thereafter decline to use any word ending in -ly.
Never mind that every well-written, published book I've ever encountered uses a judicious number of adverbs.
Never mind that the warning about sentence attributions is arbitrary, and that published writers use those too.
Never mind that articles like this tend themselves to be full of adverbs. "With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly." Umm.
Never mind that plenty of adverbs don't end in -ly (never, almost, somewhat), or that many words that do aren't adverbs at all (ugly, lovely, smelly), and that few adverb haters seem to grasp these distinctions.
Never mind that avoiding adverbs leads to contorted writing. "Never use adverbs" and "Do not use adverbs" sound fine, but "never" and "not" are adverbs. So to be consistent, I'd have to say "Use zero adverbs." Yuck, nobody talks like that!
So there's my anti-diatribe diatribe.
I'm finally getting to these links and they are juicy! Sarah McCarry is the greatest!