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The Passive Voice

A writing pen image, which is super original on a writing blog. It's all I could do on short notice, cut me some slack okay.

I’m going to start highlighting blogs that I hit up on a regular basis concerning writing, publishing, or anything else I find interesting. Feel free to suggest any to me as well, via email or on twitter. I am always hungry for new content and if I like it I’ll do my best to share.

Todays addition:

The Passive Voice

The blog hails itelf as being about “Writers, Writing, Publishing, Disruptive Innovation, and the Universe” and it covers all of that. It’s become my goto link for all manner of news dealing with publishing and self-publishing from interviews, articles, excerpts, to quotes. I am finding it more and more relevant to my journey into the publishing sphere.

I included it in my Links section at the bottom of my page. My goal is to get a second column on here someday, and all that stuff waaaaaay down at the bottom will be higher up and actual useful/findable. (Biggest downside to the Chunk theme in my opinion.) So yeah, I’ll fix that, someday… soon… after I finished that next chapter.

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Indie publishing becomes traditional publishing

If you’re at all considering self-publishing you should be reading Dean Wesley Smith. He had a great post today highlighting an interesting number with crossover publishing deals in 2012 and one of his comments really stood out to me:

Of the 300 or so six figure deals that were reported to them in 2012, 45 were from books that started off self-published.

That’s almost twenty precent an impressive number. I don’t doubt we’ll continue to see upward momentum in 2013. Keep writing indie authors it’s a great time to be in this industry.

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The Purge

Launching Writing Career

The new year for me is a good time to reflect on the previous year and refocus, start on the right foot as it were. 2012 was great, I hit a few milestones, I began shopping Coal Belly and I finished The Stars Were Right. Not bad, but it’s time to take this a step further. I have decided that 2013 is going to be a very productive year for me and I have narrowed my focus down to two specific goals:

  1. Really focus on getting published (trying both traditional and self routes.)
  2. Try to finish not one but two manuscripts.

That’s a lot in a year, but I think I can do it. However there’s one distraction that constantly crops up, hence, the purge.

Yesterday I woke up and began to tackle my single greatest time-sink that would prevent me from achieving these two goals – video games. I love ’em, I have a whole blog about ’em (which will probably be going away soon.)

The thing is as much as I enjoy gaming I love writing more. Outside of my day job my time is limited. If I want to make a serious go at writing that’s where I need to put 100% my free time. It’s far to easy to put aside working on my next tale and spend hours upon hours playing games. I caught myself doing it a lot in past weeks and it’s time to stop. If I am going to achieve my goals then I need to redouble my efforts take steps to not distract myself. So sorry video games, you gotta go.

So… as I write this, I’m watching Steam slowly remove a bunch of games from my hard drive and I canceled a few preorders that were sitting out there like time-sink landmines waiting to come along and steal a weekend or two of productivity.

Sort of related: here’s a video Ze Frank posted when he restarted A Show it’s something I find incredible encouraging and anytime I begin a new manuscript or start down a new path I re-watch it. Keep in mind it’s NSFW (language.) Maybe you’ll find it encouraging as well:

How about you? Are you setting goals for yourself? You doing anything to help you achieve those goals? What’s 2013 hold for you?

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Why I chose WordPress.

Why I chose WordPress

I’ve been running an experiment, sharing the same posts between a Tumblr account and this WordPress account. I wanted to see which I preferred. I have used both for many years, and Tumblr is definitely the “cool” kid right now, but WordPress has a lot of options and a rich community. I figured it was a valid experiment. My results: after trying this experiment I decided to stick with WordPress.

To me Tumblr is a spot for curation. WordPress is for conversation. There’s a big difference between those two things and when it comes to a blog on writing, I prefer the latter. I had no idea what it took to get published, I’m not formally trained, I never took college writing classes. I am learning as I go, and posting as I learn. I have already gained a lot from the conversations I’ve already had and that’s why I am sticking around.