In The Joy of Music, Leonard Bernstein wrote about Beethoven: “Imagine a whole lifetime of this struggle, movement after movement, symphony after symphony, sonata after quartet after concerto. Always probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection, to the principle of inevitability. This somehow is the key to the mystery of a great artist: that…
Category: General Interest
Writing Effective First Lines
It is #IndieApril in the Twitterverse, and RMFW has a robust list of independently published authors. While I plan on spending all month promoting this talented group of writers, I wanted to talk specifically about how they approach the art of first lines. There are countless ways to start a story, but the best is…
What’s in a (pen) name? A whole lot!
Hi, I’m Julie Kazimer, also known as J.A. Kazimer. Soon to be known as yet another name. Welcome to the world of publishing. Sometimes in this industry, a writer is forced or wants to create a new pen name, for a variety of reasons. Some good. Some terrible. The good are easy enough. The author…
The Death of the Mass Market Paperback
I read Publisher’s Weekly every week as part of my job. There’s always a little graph showing the ups and downs of book sales. Sometimes there is good news and overall sales are up. Sometimes sales are down. But almost every week there’s one figure that constantly declines, and it’s been doing so for years….
Plotting Whiplash
I remember reading Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever as a teen and feeling frustrated. At the time, I didn’t have the experience to define the source of that frustration, but later in life I was able to put my finger on it. I was reading good-sized books about epic fantasy adventures,…