Writer Unboxed

Thanks for sticking with us during the holiday break. Therese and I are pleased that our traffic stayed steady through our 12 days of rest and refueling from blogging. We’re eager to get back to the business of bringing YOU the best of the craft of genre fiction.
And so we’re kicking off 2008 […]

Originally posted May, 2006.
Some folks say you should never, by pain of death, refer to your manuscript as your baby. Too personal. Far too unprofessional. It should be considered a work, and if it’s not, um…working, then you should be more than willing to toss it out with the bathwater and try, try again.
You’ve also […]

A novelist tops the lists of major magazines as entertainer of the year, and that’s awesome to behold. Finally, writers have more cachet than skanked-out pop stars and NBA players.
JK Rowling is Entertainment Weekly’s #1 entertainer for 2007. She should’ve been named entertainer of the decade, considering we’ll be watching Harry Potter movies […]

I’ve had visitors in the house for over a week. We’ve been driving around, visiting other relatives, showing off the local sights. I’ve cooked three huge meals and made a ton of sandwiches. I’ve seen four movies in five days (who knew there were so many films for kids out at the […]

Read THIS ARTICLE, with this compelling first line:
If the writers strike continues for a long period, some book agents fear that many option deals will be nixed, causing major disruptions in the business. Others worry that the market for new literary materials will dry up altogether, as the major studios dig in for the long […]

And they’re off…

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 […]

Therese and I are going to be busy over the next few days tabulating the votes for the winner of WU’s unique word contest, ergo, apologies for a hasty post. But there are a few newsy items of interest to fiction writers that I wanted to highlight, in case you haven’t been skimming Therese’s […]

September 16 is an important date by anyone’s reckoning. It’s the 259th day of the year (260th in leap years). And in this day in history:

The first game of softball was played in Chicago, Illinois in 1887

The Massachusetts village of Shawmut changed its name to Boston in 1630
Hildegard of Bingen, German magistra and […]

Update on today’s post: Well, what do you know. Barnes & Noble has just reversed their decision! Read GalleyCat’s piece on this breaking news HERE. I appreciate their closing thoughts:
Interesting how consumer interest went from “a handful of pre-orders” to “enough customers… to warrant stocking it in our stores” in just two days, isn’t it?

If you’ve been keeping up with the WU Google Notebook updates (of course you have), you’ll already know all about the controversy over Barnes & Noble and their unwillingness to carry on their store shelves I Did it: Confessions of a Killer (the “If” in the title was removed by the Goldman family after winning […]

Last weekend I took my daughter to see the animated movie Ratatouille, and I was blown away. I’d expected a light PG romp about Disneyfied animals who have crazy adventures in Paris. I didn’t realize I was going to be treated to a meditation on creativity and artistic expression in a subtle and […]