Wanna Be a Paperback Writer?

Look!  Shameless self-promotion for Your Benefit! 

How to Write and Sell Your First Genre Novel
a 3 hour seminar on breaking into -- and staying in -- genre fiction
taught by Laura Anne Gilman
http://www.mediabistro.com/courses/cache/crs2923.asp

(skipping copy to get to the important stuff)

In this seminar, you will learn:

• The breakdowns and crossovers of genre classification.
• How to work within genre structures to create something original.
• How to pitch your work to a genre editor, as opposed to a mainstream house.
• The important know-how that gives new authors a foot in the door.
• The secret of success every genre author knows -- and how to make it work for you.
• The importance of a series concept versus a stand-alone book.
• How to maintain a career once you've had your first book accepted.

( the specifics of where and when )

the weather broke before it broke me...

Part of the problem with summer, for me, is that I tend to wake up with the sun -- which means that by 2pm, I've been up for close on nine hours, and yet the day isn't over yet.

I could never live in Alaska. Summer daylight-crazies would kill me dead.


However, to celebrate the return of pleasant breezes and comfortable warmth, my entire street seems to be stoop-sitting today. I returned from my morning bike ride down to the farmer's market (more goat cheese! more bread! snapdragons and hollyhocks!) to discover my downstairs neighbors and our landlord sitting outside, discussing things that need to be repaired. I added mine to the list, let Boomer out to roll on the sidewalk, and finished up work on a client's project (literary YA, and quite well-done). Productivity R us. The benefit of enjoying editing as much as I do writing -- I don't feel frustrated that I can't get to the writing just yet because this is a pleasure, and that will be a pleasure (for masochistic-creative values of 'pleasure'), and the only unpleasant stuff to be done today involves Boomer and his tick-prevention treatment. He did want to be an outdoors cat, more fool him...

And yet I keep thinking it's supposed to be dinner time. Does anyone else have this sort of summertime time-dilation effect?

be safe. be smart. be pissed off. they're giving the rest of us apes a bad name

Dear Universe:

If you cannot see your way to clearing our living space of upright apes (of any/all extremist views) who think that planting bombs among civilian targets is a good and just idea, please continue to make more of them incompetent, as they are much to be preferred to smart ones. Especially when they manage to take themselves out the final exit door/get themselves caught in the process of their incompetence.

Also? Smart cops/firefighters/paramedics/commonfolk are good. Smart and lucky is even better. We freely acknowledge the role luck plays in staying safe, and will not abuse it needlessly.

Thank you.

The sane portion of the upright ape population