Blarg!

Bill's blog. Writing, guitars, gratuitous Simpsons references, you'll find i​t all here. Almost certainly a waste of time for both you and the author. On the internet, that's actually a plus.

New column at Writer Unboxed: "Get Over Rejection in 6 Easy Steps"

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My new column is up at Writer Unboxed, and it deals with the always timely topic of rejection. And by timely, I mean writers get a lot of rejection slips. Here's an excerpt. 

Be proactive for next time. For future submissions, remember the SASE itself is an extra chance at making a sale. Imagine a sinister editor cackling and twirling his mustache as he stuffs a Xeroxed, quarter-page, form rejection slip into your envelope. But what’s this? Waiting for him inside the envelope is a SECRET ALTERNATE ENDING that replaces your dramatic courtroom scene with a rootin’-tootin’ cowboy shoot-em-up. Only someone with your talent and skill could come up with not one, but TWO endings he doesn’t like.

Read the whole thing here.

Get Over Rejection in 6 Easy Steps

 

The AV Club harshly rebukes folks who are too cool for the Super Bowl

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I'd like to publicly thank the AV Club for so eloquently expressing how I've felt for years. In "Nobody cares that you don’t care about the Super Bowl" writer John Teti explains that he's had enough of people smugly patting themselves on the back for not engaging in something as banal as football.

I’m talking to you, the graduate student who tweets “Time to catch up on my Proust” two minutes before kickoff. May you be struck with the flu on the day of your dissertation defense. And to you, the parent who takes his kids sledding on Super Bowl Sunday and posts a picture to Instagram with the caption “What football game?” Oh, and of course you applied the “1977” photo filter. May your firstborn face-plant into the nearest snowbank, and may you capture the moment in tilt-shifted, high-dynamic-range, desaturated glory...

...it can feel transgressive to proclaim that you don’t care.

But it’s not transgressive, and it’s not even interesting. Last year’s game got a 48.1-percent share of TV viewers. That means that of the people watching television while the Super Bowl was on, more than half were watching something else—and that doesn’t even account for all the people who had the TV off entirely. If you’re ignoring the Super Bowl, you’re not a freaking iconoclast. You’re a member of the silent majority.

At least, it would be nice if you were silent, because it’s fun for the rest of us to pretend that the Super Bowl is one big, dumb party with the whole United States in attendance. We don’t have many of those collective moments left.

Like I've said before, when you hang out with a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy writers, a lot of them aren't very into football. I don't have the least bit of a problem with that. It's people's crowing about their indifference that bugs me. Nobody likes to have other people say that what they enjoy is dumb, even something as culturally pervasive as football.

Nobody cares that you don’t care about the Super Bowl

Relevant

A needlessly long post about the upcoming football season written for people who don't care about football

New column is up at Writer Unboxed: "You Need to Make These New Year’s Writing Resolutions"

Have a look-see at my new column at Writer Unboxed: You Need to Make These New Year’s Writing Resolutions.

Celebrate National Novel Writing Month every month! Remember, remember, the month of November, when you wrote and you wrote till you dropped? If you can write a novel in a month once, there’s no scientific reason you can’t maintain that pace all year long. By the end of the year you’ll have like three entire detective series, or half of an epic fantasy series. I mean, what have you been doing December through October, eating bonbons? Get to work! (Note: This article is published on January 18, so you’re already behind).

Click the link to read the whole damn thing.

You Need to Make These New Year’s Writing Resolutions

I'll be paneling at Illogicon January 10-12

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I'll be at Illogicon this weekend in Durham, NC. Come on down to the Embassy Suites Raleigh-Durham and hear me say something dumb. I'll be in some pretty interesting sessions with a bunch of smart people:

Friday, January 10

  • 4 pm: The Fortunes of Small Press
  • 9 pm: Lies with Words

Saturday, January 11

  • 12 pm: Social Scientists' Science Fiction

Sunday, January 12

  • 10 am: Advice for Fiction Writers
  • 12 pm: Reading
  • 1 pm: Fuck the Universal Translator!
  • 4 pm: The Superhero Next Door
  • 5 pm: New Trends in Speculative Fiction

Illogicon 

New column: The Definitive List of Christmas Gifts for Writers

Photo credit: LMU Library

Photo credit: LMU Library

My new column is up at Writer Unboxed: "The Definitive List of Christmas Gifts for Writers." Head on over and take a look!

For Your Friend Who Writes Poetry: Inspiration

You know that friend of yours who doesn’t listen when you say that poetry is a dead art form? And who’d be a dynamite mystery novelist if she quit mucking around with unrhymed nonsense? Inspire her with some classic Agatha Christie. Inscribe it with encouraging words like, “Her work reminds me of yours,” or, “Don’t you just love complete sentences?” Don’t worry whether she likes it or not. You’re doing this out of love; it’s no coincidence that passive-aggression rhymes with massive affection.

The Definitive List of Christmas Gifts for Writers via Writer Unboxed

My new column at Writer Unboxed: "The Mostly Complete Guide to Getting Your NaNoWriMo Novel Published"

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You’re halfway through National Novel Writing Month, which means you’re 35 percent finished with your novel. What better time than now to start thinking about getting it published? I’ve got all the tips you need right here in my new Hacks for Hacks column at Writer Unboxed.

You may have heard a few editors and literary agents complain about the volume of NaNoWriMo submissions–they’d like you to think they dread December the way peasants living in the shadow of Dracula’s castle fear sunset. These agents aren’t talking to YOU, my special little snowflake. Those OTHER manuscripts have two things in common: They’re junk, and they’re not YOUR manuscript. Like the dairy-fresh chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream hiding behind the fourteen tubs of freezer-burned vanilla in my icebox, your brilliance will never stand out more than when it’s submitted next to these wannabes. 

The Mostly Complete Guide to Getting Your NaNoWriMo Novel Published via Writer Unboxed