My favorite author events are those where the author might read a passage of the book, then stop, look up, and say something like: “You know, the morning I wrote this particular section was right after I spent a night shoveling water.”

If an agent doesn’t pick your manuscript up as interesting, don’t be disheartened. It really could be that it’s not the right “fit.” Remember, there’s no accounting for taste. Some prefer vodka; some prefer wine; some find that vinegar works just fine. Move on, move on, because, as that contest’s results prove, sometimes it’s the agent who is just not the right fit for you and yours.

when I write, I write with an eye to being able to change the details while holding the story so that, when an editor asks for an update to “present day two years from now,” I can easily do it without having the story fall to pieces. What doesn’t change are the characters or the plot. Just the elements of the setting.

Humorous, sad, terrifying, or poignant, writing lies from truth becomes less that of invention and more of an exercise in skillfully adjusting truth so it’s palatable as fiction.

I take a lot of my story and novel ideas from real life. For example:

Well, it’s been a lo-ong haul, getting back in the saddle, again.  While I’m writing, what I’m writing isn’t fiction.  It’s articles and reviews.  Right now, aside from submitting articles to some online magazines, I’m critiquing two novel manuscripts for their authors.  Doing this allows me to ease back into working on my own novels. [...]

Moving, I’ve discovered, is tough on writers and their novels — at least on this writer, anyway. Finding the rhythm, getting back into the routine, and finding “the zone,” is difficult in a fresh, new environment, especially since we’ve still not got a solid household routine.
I’m finding it terribly difficult to return to work-in-progress [...]

Scott Heim reads from We Disappear at last reading at Chelsea
Part 1
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Part 3
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Part 5
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Part 7 (Conclusion)

Anyone who practices a self-defense art and/or wields a weapon (gun, knife, sword, club/cane/staff) knows “ludicrous” when they read it. I just speed read a book with so many absolutely naive “fight scenes,” that the genre should have been slap stick comedy, rather than a supposedly serious commercial read. I won’t give out [...]

IN HER POST of March 30, 2008, Lori Perkins of L. Perkins Agency suggests that to get a major New York publisher interested, authors need to be able to guarantee at least 25,000 copies of their book will sell.
“…every book has to be perfect (not too long or short and well crafted) and come with [...]