Writer Unboxed

That accelerating metronomic sound you hear is the NaNo clock about to blazon the start of this year’s NaNoWriMo competition. TOMORROW marks the beginning of the 2007 event, which means there’s still time for you to sign up if you haven’t already. (Visit the NaNo site HERE to do so.)
I recently had the pleasure of […]

Looks like the latest trend in publishing, the peer-selected novel, is gathering steam.  Gather.com’s second contest, this time for romance novels, has selected not one but TWO winners:

What do a 28-year-old PhD student from the University of Chicago and a 56-year-old horse farmer from rural Michigan have in common? Both of these lucky women will […]

Some writer friends pointed out this cool image last week. Do you see a girl spinning counterclockwise or clockwise? Surprisingly, not everyone will see the same thing, even if they’re staring at the screen in the same moment. Seriously. And what you see now may not be what you see fifteen minutes or seven hours […]

Last Monday night, this was the view from my mother’s house:

It was a bad week, to say the least. Thankfully, my mother returned five days later to find that the house had been spared. Horribly, the house across the street didn’t make it. Nor did the avocado grove. Or 250 other homes […]

If you missed part 1 of our interview with National Novel Writing Month’s founder and inspirational leader Chris Baty, click HERE for a quick remedy, then come on back.
In this, the 2nd of our 3-part interview with Chris, we talk about what NaNo ISN’T, why “30″ is a magic number, the secrets to NaNo success, […]

You’ll have to excuse me, but I haven’t been writing very much since Transformers was released on DVD. I saw it twice in the theater, and have watched at least once a day since I bought my copy.
Ahhh … now we find out who actually reads this blog.
I simplify the reaction possibilities considerably by […]

I parted ways with an agent almost two years ago and have been assiduously searching for a new one ever since with two new novels. I don’t have one yet, but the ride keeps swerving, rising and diving.
Maybe you know the feeling. First there’s the long, slow, laborious grind of cranking up that first big […]

I’m in deep-edit mode today, so here’s what you’re getting from me: a warning about commas that applied in 1905 and probably still applies today.
Any one who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable, and question his conscience, as severely as we ought to […]

Occasionally, a genre film comes along which stays firmly rooted in the conventions of the genre while messing with the viewers preconceptions and expectations. Usually the attempts are clumsy and self-indulgent. Paul Verhoeven’s Zwartboek, or Black Book, is anything but.
I’m a sucker for good war movies, and Black Book leaped off the shelf […]

He’s out of the closet at last:
After reading briefly from her mega-selling book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, on Friday night, Rowling took questions from an audience of 1,600 students. A 19-year-old from Colorado asked about the avuncular headmaster of Hogwarts School: ‘Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall […]

If you’ve never heard of National Novel Writing Month, you need to ditch that rock you’ve been living under! NaNoWriMo Fever has swept the nation, with writers renouncing sleep and a good chunk of sanity during the month of November in order to attain a single goal: finish an unimpressive draft of a 50,000 word […]

NaNoWriMo is nigh. For those (few) aspiring novelists who aren’t aware of National Novel Writing Month, NaNo is a cyber community of writers who’s goal is to write 50,000 words of their novel in the month of November. What you write will surely be dreck. But that’s the point. Get the first draft over quickly, […]