Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 1/2/13

Not too many links today. While you read, here's Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American mouth." Yes, I know it's from the Twilight soundtrack. The Twilight movies have excellent soundtracks.

1. "Loved Your Book, Can't Publish It." Lynn Price at Behler Blog writes about the frustration of trying to sell an excellent book that's not currently marketable.

2. "Just Shut Up." An excellent post about loving problematic media.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a child, nobody sat down with me after I watched Beauty and the Beast and said, “Okay, this is a movie, and it’s okay to enjoy this movie! It’s okay to think this movie is great! But just so you know, if someone in real life did to you the things the Beast does to Belle, that wouldn’t be okay. That wouldn’t be right.”  When my mind was young and malleable, there was no trusted adult pointing out, “This is a movie, and it’s okay to like this movie, but the relationship it shows is unhealthy.” And that’s not because I didn’t have those trusted adults in my life! I was lucky enough to grow up with two intelligent, liberal, kind, forward-thinking, active parents; they didn’t tell me because they didn’t know to tell me. They didn’t tell me because nobody told them. (via not language but a map)

3.  "Research -- All The Layers." An ode to research at YA Highway.

4. "How Long Should You Keep Trying To Get Published?" Jane Friedman discusses when not to try for publication, when to start thinking about it, and when it might be good to step back and take another look at what you're doing.

5. "Ten Things I Wish I'd Known." Julianne Lee at Book View Cafe talks about things beginning writers should know about the publishing process.

6. "Prophecies." Patricia C. Wrede weighs in on prophecies, why they often don't work in modern fantasy novels, and why they absolutely can work if used correctly. 

And that's all for this week! Going off to work on the winter story, and then to edit more of WOODS. Hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday season, and that 2013 is your best year yet. : )

New thing

So: if you were wondering: I'm (probably) starting a new thing. I will try to start each day's writing with 20 minutes on whatever short story is in the works. Once I finish a piece, I'll submit it down the list of the SFWA's qualifying short fiction venues, in descending order of probable interest. (I doubt, however, that I'll have the patience for the ones that don't allow online submissions.) If none of them bite, I will put the piece up here. That way you (three) get to see what I'm doing, and I get to... practice submitting things.

The first story is tentatively called "Snow on the Beach."

Before writing this, I tabbed up a lot of those venues' websites for a look-see. It just so happened that Apex Magazine has a story about an undine. Who loves a good undine? You know I do. Best: It's not fantasy so much as horror. Very funny; very creepy; beautifully written. An author to watch!

That's all.