to give you a warning. A few days ago Shock Totem received a story called “Baboulas” by an author calling himself Richard Ridyard. John Boden, Assistant Editor of Shock Totem, read the story and immediately cried foul. “This is plagiarism,” he said. “This is Stephen King’s ‘The Boogeyman’ from his Night Shift collection. Even the title is the same!” ‘Baboulas’ … Read More
Pitching For The Terrified. First Impressions.
All right. It’s time to talk pitches. I am qualified to write on this subject because last week when I gave my first pitch, I had absolutely no idea what a pitch even was. How does that qualify me, you ask? I’m going to discuss Pitching for the Terrified, Mercedes Style. What does that mean? It means that if I … Read More
Running Through the Mojave…Part 2
Like it wasn’t hard enough the first time! (Heat exhaustion, throwing up on the course, longing to die for days afterwards.) And that was only a 5k! (True, it was in the heat of the day. “Running With The Devil” indeed.) But I’m going to be running my very first half marathon on Halloween morning. Where, you ask? Through the Mojave and … Read More
Be Mysterious: An Official Call
So if you have to blame somebody, blame Natalie Sin. Come on, it’s easy. I blame her all of the time! My daughter is so into dancing boys in bunny suits, now. Thanks to Sin herself, I may be raising a Furry. But I digress. We were talking about online personas and how we want our authors and artists to be … Read More
Robert Duperre Reviews…Moi!
Robert Duperre, author of The Rift, wrote an especially nice review of Michelle Howarth and I. That’s pretty cool. I waver between being all blushingly demure and “Yay!” excited. Stop by his blog A Journal of Always to read it, if you’d like. It would make all three of us happy. 🙂 Tomorrow I make my official Call to Mystery. … Read More
Come Back, My True Love
It’s still officially WIP Wednesday, at least for another 8 minutes. I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. I read slush, work from my writer’s group, and I’m going to town on a friend’s novel, since I’m good at removing back-story with a lethal stroke of my fiery pen. I read stories that my friends write. Oh, yeah, and … Read More
Luck Be A Lady…I’m Not Buying It
If there’s one thing that I don’t have, it’s luck. Or I do have luck, but it’s usually terrible, black luck, so I simply choose to ignore it. But when it comes to writing, you hear it all of the time: A lot of things depend on luck. You run across the right agent at the right time. The editor … Read More
Putting Life Back In Order
Why, greetings, family. I haven’t seen you in a long time. How are you? Lovely. I spent today cleaning house, in both the writing world and Real Life. I’ve been MIA because of KillerCon, so I had to reassemble the house a little bit. While I was at it, I returned emails and neatened things up on the computer. I … Read More
KillerCon Day 3
It’s the last day of KillerCon. I missed saying goodbye to about half of the people that I meant to, but I’ll email them to continue our conversations. These conversations include: working with sociopaths (and the “deletion of the empathy gene”) cookie recipe, shopping tips, and agent pitches. I’m excited to sit down tomorrow and write a real post about … Read More
KillerCon Day 2
I was bullied into pitching to agents, and it worked out in my favor. We learned about digital marketing techniques, listened to a band made up entirely of writers, bid a few fond farewells, and then took off for the Freemont Street Experience. I’m really sad that it’s over tomorrow. I feel like I learned a lot in a short … Read More