Douglas Blaine has a response to Pam Noles’ essay Shame. He writes: For a brief time in the third grade of the Catholic school I went to in Kansas (from what I hear not the same as Catholic school back east) there was a girl named Rochelle Ramsey that I was good friends with the…
Author: Tobias Buckell
Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author. His novels and over seventy stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.
What’s the Average Advance on a Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel?
In 2005 and 2007 108 science fiction and fantasy authors replied to a survey I did asking what they got for an advance for a book. Basically I put up a survey on my website that people could fill out who were SF or Fantasy authors (sorry other genres, I don’t log your data, even…
Can Young Writers Get Published?
Sartorias and Justine Larbalestier dish about whether young writers can get published. Justine: Recently I’ve had a number of letters from teenagers wanting advice on how to get their novel published and wondering whether their age will make it harder for them to get it into print. Specifically, would they be discriminated against because they…
Six Reasons For a Writer to Have an Agent
Paperback Writer (or also known as SF Writer S.L Viehl) corrects herself here about the advice that you sell a book to a publisher first and then get an agent. An agent popped in to negate that, and I added that I’d also acquired my agent who then sold the book to a publisher, but…
What Book Turned You Into an SF Fan?
SF Signal asks what book turned you into an SF Fan, with reference to Bob Wallace’s enjoying the swords and blasters stylings of Burroughs. I had never seen anything like it. The cover had two huge moons floating in the night sky above a city of spires and towers. There were what appeared to be…
Is Science Fiction Too Politically Correct?
Over at Tangent Online SF fan/critic Dave Truesdale jumps the shark as he decrys the evil Liberal conspiracy to force short fiction magazine editors to buy metrosexualized short stories and so forth and so on. Nick Mamatas has his usually sharp retorts on his livejournal. Anyway, Dave wonders if SF is going soft these days….
Keeping Rejections Taped to a Wall Doesn’t Make Me a Serial Killer!
Did anyone watch Law and Order on NBC last night (it’s one of the few channels besides PBS and the ‘God’ channel we get in the house. Emily and I wonder if it will become the ‘all Law and Order all the time’ channel)? The basic premise was that a frustrated wannabe author writes a…
Code Sliding
Over at Transterrestrial Musings Simberg has a post about human tribes without the words for larger numbers and how it impacts their ability to count, but then follows it with something I want to quibble with. So first he notes: Here’s an interesting article that says that human tribes without words for numbers larger than…
Why I Write Caribbean Futures
Geoffrey Philp is a Caribbean author with a story in ‘Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root’ called Uncle Obadiah and The Alien, which I really enjoyed, and I found his website this week and was perusing through and was quite taken with this quote of his: When would we write stories that liberated us from…
How Long Should a Novel Be?
I’ve told a number of people starting novels or thinking about them or shopping them that shorter is better these days, and the old adage about needing to write a big first book is totally not true. There seems to be a persistent meme going around about needing to pad novels. It’s not true. First…