Mark Charan Newton

Despite the impression we authors like to give, publishing isn’t just about us. There are people who work behind the scenes and they work extremely hard in producing novels each month, and what’s more, they get little acknowledgement. These are the people who help shape careers, as well as an industry, yet they don’t often [...]

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(Or, Why Nick Mamatas Rocks.) Particularly because of his rebuttal on behalf of the civilised world against Spinrad’s cack-handed approach to discussing World SF.
Instead, it’s a meandering display of fundamental ignorance about what we call “world science fiction.”… The problem is that Spinrad is just making an appeal to ignorance. He’s not familiar with the [...]

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As reported in Publishers Weekly:
In an unusual move for an established author, critically acclaimed novelist, memoirist and National Book Award finalist John Edgar Wideman is teaming up with self-publishing and print-on-demand service Lulu.com to release, Briefs, Stories for the Palm of the Mind, a new collection of his short stories. The new book will go [...]

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Fascinating article in the Globe and Mail about advice writing. (Via Bookninja.)
The market for fiction shrinks every year, the attention paid to novels by the media diminishes monthly, booksellers demand ever-lower prices, everybody in the industry says it’s the worst it’s ever been. And yet more academic or private creative-writing programs are created every year, [...]

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It’s raised its ugly head once again:
Why are clichés shunned in the text of novels, but often embraced on the cover? Should publishers look for the same originality in their art departments that they seek in their authors?
It keeps cropping up. The internets hates clichéd covers and demands changes in cover art – new, shiny, [...]

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If you’re looking to get funding to write a book, one option is to use Kickstarter, which was pointed out to me in the comments of a previous post.

I’m sure by linking to this, it’s going to annoy the hell out of some writers – those who think we’ve a god-given right to be doing [...]

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Now here’s a novel idea:

It’s the unusual approach taken by Deanna Zandt, an American “media technologist and consultant to key progressive media organisations”. Last summer she issued a plea on her blog for donations to support her while she spent three months writing a book about social networking as a tool for social change and [...]

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To all aspiring writers: an idea, an experiment.
Music gets remixed all the time, where an original track is altered by someone else. The new version can enhance that original piece, or sometimes tarnish it – but, mostly, something interesting is produced.
Does the same work for literature? Is it simply re-writing? Who knows.
So here’s the [...]

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From Sam Sykes’s interview of James @ Speculative Horizons:
Sometimes I feel that this whole blood-and-guts approach is merely disguising the fact that some of these books aren’t that inventive. Still, it’s a trend that I don’t think will go away any time soon.
An interesting point. I’ve seen it again and again, talk of gritty fantasy [...]

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The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, by Michael Swanwick. A Cracking little read, this one, bonkers and brave and brash. Totally slaps anyone who suspects ‘gritty’ fantasy is a new thing. This book doesn’t shy away from adult language and themes (war, racism, sexism), and has a pleasing mish-mash of aesthetics, from the gentle veneer of the [...]

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From Wired magazine:
Dante’s Inferno proves it: Classic literature is a videogame gold mine.
Now that Electronic Arts is finished reimagining Dante Alighieri’s epic poem as an Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 adventure through the circles of hell, the development team’s going to need to find inspiration in other classic literary works.
Game|Life would like to humbly suggest [...]

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Basically, it’s Dances With Wolves, with blue people, and spaceships, set in a forest, and as if the director has skimmed through books by James Lovelock. All of those things are independently good – even Costner, one of the Hollywood icons when I was a wee nipper.
But, well, it was all a bit silly. [...]

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