Recent content by Stevenmlong

Grendel is a great book, and Gardner's books on writing are quite good, too (though I haven't read them in a long time). I remember reading about Gardner going into his to-be agent's office with boxes of manuscripts free-handed on yellow paper. A very different time.

You've gotten some really good advice, so far. I'd consider writing out a (brief) strategy, that addresses what you're doing and why you're doing it. Are you aiming for a long-term web presence? A hub for readers/others to find you? A place to generally network and be part of the web...

Congrats! Some nice questions. It's a funny thing to talk about, sometimes, isn't it? Especially with friends/family members that don't know you that well, for whom you usually at least in some small ways put on a facade. It's kind of like saying okay... this is what I'm really like.

Very cool, thanks for posting it!

First person has the benefit of intimacy, and is more useful if you have a strong, complex central character that can engage and hold readers. Third person has more flexibility and breadth, that you can use both to create a world with multiple points of view and from a plotting perspective use...

This is a cool idea. I'm extremely casual, but I'm playing Neverwinter now, and played GW2 and SWTOR before that (and, um, about every other game, starting in the stone ages with UO.

I'm fairly terrible at self-promotion (I have this crazy idea that if I just put things out there, people will come, rather like Field of Dreams) but I would have a hard time defending myself to my co-bloggers if I didn't at some point actively mention foesofreality.com, the site I run with a...

It has a really aesthetic to it!

Agreed. I'm not there yet, but I've always figured that given the massive amount of time spent to write a book, it seems like the cover is a good excuse to find an artist you like and shell out some bucks for an original work of art that you use as your cover and, you know, hang in your office...

One big deal about self-publishing in terms of control is that if you self-publish a novel now it might suffer from stigma or get lost in the shuffle or whatever, but you'll still own that novel in 5 years, in 10, and so forth. Self-publishing isn't a race, it's a marathon. The goal IMO isn't to...

I think that these days, "published" just refers to your work being available for mass consumption. I used to feel that it meant release through what I then thought of as "professional" channels, i.e. mainstream publication, but I think that the publishing world has evolved from that point...

A Google for fantasy writing forums, about a year ago when I was trying to get more on top of what's going on out there in the online fantasy writing world.

I can be turned off by a bad cover, but it's almost never about the content as much as it's about the quality of the artwork. Solid artwork draws me in, anything cheap will definitely rub me the wrong way.

Here are a couple I like: Kiri Moth I love Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon at Teeteringbulb! I'm always half-hunting for artists that I really like.

I think it can be a good exercise to enter contests, but it's very dicey to pay. I think a lot of it depends on what you're trying to accomplish by winning, i.e. whether you're going for a specific prize, or credibility, and so forth. I've never entered a contents, myself. No, wait - I did...