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I wrote an introductory article on unlocking writers block a few weeks ago. (The one illustrated with photos of us trying to get a horse into a trailer.) After three weeks of vacation in New Mexico, I’m home and happily and productively working on the rewrite of Mogollon, sequel to my award winning novel, Numenon.

What did it take for me to break through the dreaded block?

Well, I stepped in a rut in the driveway with my fused ankle about three days into my vacation and spent the next two weeks in great pain and unable to walk. Before that, I had in a kidney infection along with a major flu.

That’s right, I had a kidney infection at the same time as the flu.

Is suffering necessary to break through writer’s block?

It was for me.

I put a longer and deeper write up of my experience these last few weeks on my personal blog (SandraNathan.net). Here, I summarize a few key learning points that may help you deal with your dragons:

1.    Accept and surrender. If you’re unable to write what you want, or reach the depth that you know you’ve got with your writing, acknowledge it. You don’t have to like it or embrace it, just accept the fact you’re blocked. And surrender to the fact. Journal about it. Write a blog article or entire book about it.
2.    If you don’t accept your blocked state and surrender to it, you can search the Net for tips and techniques to deal with writer’s block and paralysis. You’ll find lots: Try them all. Maybe they’ll work. Chances are they won’t. When you discover this, accept your block and surrender to it.
3.    Hit bottom. I did this in my idyllic New Mexico escape, bruised ankle propped on pillows and my foot and lower leg––all the way to the knee––looking like an angry eggplant. That was after I got over the kidney infection and flu.
4.    Truly give up. Hand your whole life over to your Higher Power. If you don’t have a Higher Power, make One up.
5.    Note that the universe really is in control of your life, not you, despite what The Secret says. Healing is a combination of grace and self effort. When you surrender, the spooky stuff starts happening. For instance, when I finally hit as bottom as I’ve been in recent years, I decided to read by book club’s selection for the next month, which was:
6.    Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza. This best-selling book tells the story of how Immaculee Ilibagiza survived the murder of one million of her fellow Tutsi tribe members by rampaging Hutus. She hid in a 3 X 5 bathroom in Rwanda with 7 other women for 3 months. This book is a miracle, the finest example of contemporary Christian mysticism I have read. It jolted me into contact with my spiritual roots and provided the ground of my healing.
7.    It’s also evidence that writer’s block is not the worst thing that can happen to you.
8.    Neither are low book sales.
9.    You don’t have to be obsessed with your on-line sales, the number of blogs you write on, your web site stats, or anything about the world of writing.
10.    Life would go on if you never wrote another word.
11.    You might even enjoy your life more.

 

This is freedom. Once you attain this knowledge that you don’t need to write and the inner state that goes with it, the fountain of creativity inside of you may start to bubble again. You may get new angles for the book you were working on. You may WANT to write. You may be able to write.

Or not. You may want to run screaming from the literary world.

Try my method: Drop everything. Get to a dead stop. See what your soul says to you about your writing and your life. Do what it says.

I’m back at work writing, but in a different way. No more pounding the keyboard until my shoulders won’t move and my wounded ankle feels like it’s poured full of molten lead. No more obsessing.

I’m doing things differently and letting the immense love and good will of the universe carry me forward. If my stuff is supposed to sell, it will because people find value in it––and in getting to know me.

In God we trust, right? That’s the title of that other article I wrote about my recent three weeks of high altitude spiritual regeneration in Santa Fe.

Two more tips that could radically improve the level of peace in the world and might even help your writer’s block:

1.    Watch where you put your feet. If you watch where you put your feet, you won’t step in it. It can take many physical and metaphorical forms. The rut in the driveway that nailed my already screwed-down ankle taught me the wisdom of simple truths: Watch where you step.
2.    Keep your ankle above your heart. This is a variant of an Eastern spiritual practice. In Eastern religions, worshipers pranam, bow, to their gurus, sacred objects, or representations of deities. The pranam involves either going down on one’s hands and knees and touching one’s forehead to the floor or a total prostration, lying face down on the floor with your hands over your head––a full pranam.

The pranam honors the sacred and forces one to put one’s head below one’s heart. That is, a pranam puts the rational, judgmental function of the intellect below the empathetic, intuitive, compassionate function of the heart. This is a good thing. Few people get in trouble because they’re too compassionate.

My episode with my ankle indicated that keeping your ankle above your heart can be an equally powerful means of attaining surrender, peace and nonviolence. Could those Hutus have murdered all those people if they’d kept their ankles about their hearts? No.

You can’t do much lying on your back with your ankle above your heart. This posture does provide a perfect opportunity to catch up on the meditations you’ve missed since you started writing seriously twenty years ago. You can contemplate existence like crazy.

With your ankle above your heart, your ankle’s swelling will go down, and so may that of your head. It’s a humbling thing, lying with your leg in the air. Humbling enough to allow your soul to talk and tell you what it thinks of the way you’ve been living.

Your soul may point out certain deficiencies in your behavior that have contributed to your inability to write anything but checks. Your soul may suggest alternative behaviors. In my case, if I didn’t run myself into the ground and chase foolish …  (Contemplation can be brisk.)

Writing and lifestyle are interrelated, or so my ankle and heart told me.

In words my editor sent me (from Ephesians): Live a life worthy of the calling you have received.

In God I trust, while walking the walk.

If you want the longer form on my personal blog, click here to go to Sandra Nathan.net

This article, by Laura Miller, originally appeared on Salon.com on 5/18/09.

Why do we often care more about imaginary characters than real people? A new book suggests that fiction is crucial to our survival as a species.

Why do human beings spend so much time telling each other invented stories, untruths that everybody involved knows to be untrue? People in all societies do this, and do it a lot, from grandmothers spinning fairy tales at the hearthside to TV show runners marshaling roomfuls of overpaid Harvard grads to concoct the weekly adventures of crime fighters and castaways. The obvious answer to this question — because it’s fun — is enough for many of us. But given the persuasive power of a good story, its ability to seduce us away from the facts of a situation or to make us care more about a fictional world like Middle-earth than we do about a real place like, oh, say, Turkmenistan, means that some ambitious thinkers will always be trying to figure out how and why stories work.

The latest and most intriguing effort to understand fiction is often called Darwinian literary criticism, although Brian Boyd, an English professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the author of "On the Origin of Stories," a new book offering an overview and defense of the field, prefers the term "evocriticism." As Boyd points out, the process of natural selection is supposed to gradually weed out any traits in a species that don’t contribute to its survival and its ability to pass on its genes to offspring who will do the same. The ability to use stories to communicate accurate information about the real world has some obvious usefulness in this department, but what possible need could be served by made-up yarns about impossible things like talking animals and flying carpets?

Boyd’s explanation, heavily ballasted with citations from studies and treatises on neuroscience, cognitive theory and evolutionary biology, boils down to two general points. First, fiction — like all art — is a form of play, the enjoyable means by which we practice and hone certain abilities likely to come in handy in more serious situations. When kittens pounce on and wrestle with their litter mates, they’re developing skills that will help them hunt, even though as far as they’re concerned they’re just larking around. Second, when we create and share stories with each other, we build and reinforce the cooperative bonds within groups of people (families, tribes, towns, nations), making those groups more cohesive and in time allowing human beings to lord it over the rest of creation.

The popular understanding of evolutionary biology can be sketchy even among (I’m tempted to say especially among) its most enthusiastic lay proponents. That’s why it’s important to point out that, whatever you’ve heard about "selfish genes," the secret to humanity’s success lies less in Hobbesian competition than in individuals’ capacity to cooperate, and even to act altruistically. While there are short-term benefits to individuals who behave selfishly — say, by stealing or hoarding food — the long-term benefits of sharing usually outweigh the quick payoff, provided that everybody else in your group also participates fairly. Human beings are what biologists call "hypersocial," more social by far than any other animal, and the major product of our deep investment in sociality is our culture: our language, tools, political institutions, clothing, medicine, sculpture, songs, religions, etc.

In short, humanity itself is an element, like the weather or seasons, that each of us needs to negotiate in order to survive. We’re innately skilled at reading each other’s intentions, judging a person’s position in the current social hierarchy, checking the emotional temperature in a room, detecting when our companion isn’t paying attention to us, and so on. Those who are especially adept at this are said to have good "social skills," but the average human being is a pretty impressive social navigator even when not conscious of what she’s doing. It’s only the rare exceptions — people along the autistic spectrum, for example, whose social instincts and perceptions are impaired — who make us aware of just how essential these abilities are when it comes to getting by in this world.

Read the rest of the article on Salon.com.

This article, by James Bonnet, originally appeared on The Writer’s Store site.

Have you ever wondered why characters like Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, Achilles, Scrooge, Dorothy and Superman go on forever? The real secret of their immortality lies in something you’ve probably never equated with the creation of a great character or a great story — the quintessential.

But if you fathom the secrets of this remarkable quality, you can use it to make your characters truly charismatic and merchandisable and just about everything else in your story more fascinating.

According to the dictionary, the quintessential is the most perfect manifestation or embodiment of a quality or thing. It is the ultimate, good or bad, best or worst, example. The world’s fastest runner is the quintessential runner. The world’s deadliest snake is the quintessential deadly snake. Hitler is the quintessential megalomaniac. Einstein is the essence of mathematical genius. He is symbolic of genius.

Applied to story, it means making the story elements the best example of that element. And that is, in fact, what great stories are all about. Great stories, myths and legends are dominated by quintessential elements.

Zeus is the most powerful god. Helen of Troy is the most beautiful woman. Achilles is the greatest warrior. King Arthur is the most chivalrous king. Camelot is the most fabulous kingdom. Excalibur is the most powerful sword. Samson is the strongest man. King Herod is the nastiest tyrant. King Solomon is the wisest and richest king.

It is the key to their success. Why? Because if you make something the most extraordinary example, you will make that idea more intriguing. A secret chamber is fascinating in itself, but you could make it even more fascinating by making it the most intriguing secret chamber of all time. The black hole of Calcutta is more fascinating than an ordinary prison. A perfect murder is more fascinating than an ordinary murder, and the most perfect murder of all time is more fascinating than your run-of-the-mill perfect murder.

If your story is about ghosts, injustice or romance, taking that subject to the quintessential will make that subject more fascinating. In ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the subject of love is taken to the quintessential. It is the greatest love story of all time. ‘Harry Potter’ is about the most extraordinary magic the world has ever seen. ‘Gladiator’ is about the greatest tyranny. The Roman Empire is itself the quintessential empire. ‘The Perfect Storm’ is about the storm of the century. ‘Titanic’ is about one of the world’s worst disasters. All of which adds considerably to our fascination and interest in these stories.

The quintessential can be applied to any element of your story but is especially effective when applied to the professions and dominant traits of your characters. If you take these dimensions to the quintessential, you will make your characters more intriguing. They will make an important psychological connection and that will add significantly to the power of your work.

Read the rest of the article on The Writer’s Store site.

This post, from Charlie, originally appeared on his Productive Flourishing site on 9/29/08.

“I’m not creative.”
“I wish I could be more creative, but I don’t have it in me.”
“Why are some people creative and others aren’t?”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard those statements or questions…

The truth is almost everyone has creative potential. What separates good creatives (or dormant creatives that get lucky) is that they’ve learned how to walk through the creative process. The irony is that most of them don’t know that there is a documented process, yet they’ve developed habits and processes that allow them to walk through the process. On some brute level, they understand the process, though they don’t know how the process works.

A large part of the problem is that there is an air of mystery and mysticism around the creative process. Because people assume and reinforce the idea that some have creative potential and others don’t, those that do harness their potential and work through the process become all the more “different.” And because so few of us see that leveraging our creativity is inextricably linked to how we make money, we let our creative process devolve into a daily crap shoot.

So, let’s take a few minutes and demystify the creative process.

The Four Steps of Creativity

We’ve known for a long time that the creative process can be broken down into four distinct processes, most of which can be fostered and augmented. The processes are:

1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Illumination
4. Implementation

I’ll spend some time on each step.

Preparation

This is the first phase of what most call work. A writer, for example, prepares either by writing, reading, or revising earlier work. A musician plays scales, chords, or songs…a painter messes with paints or visits an art gallery…an entrepreneur researches problems to solve….a programmer plays with code. In each example, the creative is going through relatively mundane processes.

The reason I say most call this phase “work” is because these processes may or may not be inherently enjoyable. They’re also fairly mundane and tedious, but the creative has learned that this process is necessary to plant the seeds that lead to…

Incubation

This would be the mystical process if there were one because you often don’t know that you’re percolating an idea, or if you do know you’re working on one, you don’t know when it’s going to come out. It’s at this phase that your conscious and subconcious mind are working on the idea, making new connections, separating unnecessary ideas, and grabbing for other ideas.

This is the phase that most people mess up the most with distractions and the hustle and bustle of daily lives. Modern life, with its many beeps, buzzes, and distractions, has the strong tendency to grab the attention of both our subconcious and unconscious mind, and as result, the creative process stops and is instead replaced by more immediate concerns.

However, from this phase comes…

Illumination

This is the “Eureka” moment that many of us spend our days questing after. When it hits, the creative urge is so incredibly strong that we lose track of what else is happening. The driving impulse is to get whatever is going on in our head down into whatever medium it’s intended to go.

The most frustrating thing for me is that the “illumination” moments happen at the most inopportune times. They invariably happen when I’m in the shower, when I’m driving by myself, when I’m working out, or when I’m sitting in mind-numbing meetings that I can’t get out of. Of course, the bad part is as I said above: the impulse is to get the idea out as soon as possible, so it’s not at all uncommon for me to stop showering, driving, or working out and run to the nearest notepad – and, in meetings, I start purging immediately anyway. I’ve yet to gain enough clout to excuse myself from the meetings, but I’m working on it.

Read the rest of the post on Productive Flourishing.

Good Morning Everyone here on Publetariat,

My name is MICHAEL PHELPS . . I am the good-looking, OLD Writer . .

NOT the good-looking, YOUNG & talented Olympic Champion with all that Gold.

My recently released novel; THE EXECUTION OF JUSTICE has received NINE REVIEWS thus far. All reviews can be seen on my web site: http://www.MichaelPhelpsNovels.com, www.amazon.com and www.BarnesandNoble.com.

I just returned from the BOOK EXPO AMERICA show at the Jacob Javitts Center in New York City.  It was a very busy, long and productive four days.

At the show, I experienced the great honor of meeting MR. DONALD MAASS, Founder and President of The Donald Maass Literary Agency, Inc. (New York).  He is the most respected and successful Literary Agent of all time. In addition, he is a Best Selling Author in his own right.,  He is NOT my Agent (yet), but I was impressed with his graciousness and interest.

My publisher has also entered into a contract with Small Press United to be the exclusive distributor for my novel, THE EXECUTION OF JUSTICE, so it will be available nationwide in major and independent book stores.

In addition, I am Re-Releasing "DAVID JANSSEN – MY FUGITIVE", which I co-Authored with ELLIE JANSSEN in 1994. It appears there exists a great deal of sustained interest in the Golden Globe winning, Emmy Nominated late actor, best known for his staring role as "THE FUGITIVE" (ABC Television – 1963-1967.

Thank you all for reading this, and have a great week.

Michael Phelps

www.MichaelPhelpsNovels.com

I am pleased to have attended the BOOK EXPO AMERICA show at the Jacob Javitts Center in New York City.

It was a very busy and productive show.  I was honored to meet MR. DONALD MAASS, Founder and President of THE DONALD MAASS LITERARY AGENCY, INC. of New York.  He is NOT my Agent (yet), but he is the most successful Agent ever, and a Best Selling Author in his own right.

My novel, THE EXECUTION OF JUSTICE has received Nine Reviews thus far; 5 are FIVE STARS, and 4 are FOUR STARS. All reviews can be viewed at my web site: http://www.MichaelPhelpsNovels.com, www.amazon.com and www.BarnesandNoble.com.

I have posted new photos here.

Have a great week, and READ and WRITE!

Regards to all,

Michael Phelps

Indie authors have many different milestones — the first book published, the first sale, a new review, a great response to a guest blog, an interview . . . but yesterday I sold my 1,000th book over all titles and it only took , , , 18 months. Still, despite the fact that Dan Brown does that in a day or many other Indie authors on this site have done that thrice over, it is a rather nice feeling to touch a thousand souls and still manage good reviews and accelerated sales. I even took the first day off in 18 months from writing yesterday. Had steak and onion soup with the remnants of my family. Anyhow, the sun came up on another era for this author. I shall sail the waters of my ten current projects and perhaps another thousnd sales will be out there. However, I do not think the second will be as satisfying as the first.

Edward C. Patterson
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002BMI6X8
my new Amazon Author’s Page

This morning I was FeedBlitzed with "Four Tips for Submitting Nonfiction" by literary agent Ted Weinstein. I had to wonder why is Ted promoting himself as a literary agent. Very recently, Ted rejected me as a prospective author-client, stating, "We encounter many more talented writers and interesting projects than we can represent, so we carefully guard our time to serve most effectively our small number of clients." Suddenly, here’s Ted, out in public, leaving his clientele unguarded, as he trolls for new clientele and new projects.

Never before had it occurred to me that seeking an agent or publisher is no less demeaning than finding a girl friend during post puberty. Agents and publishers present authors with a strange and sometimes bizarre world, consumed in contradictions.

Take Ted’s "Four Tips," for example. They’re actually three.

First Ted says, if you’re writing nonfiction, assume you will be self publishing. OK…then no need to have an agent. Right?

Next, Ted advises, don’t submit the introduction, if you’re submitting a sample chapter, or two. Bravo! Such clarity. This makes sense.

Thirdly, Ted says, use the term "comparable titles," rather than "competitive titles." Oops! Ted must have grabbed this tidbit of advice from my recent submission to him. I used "competitive titles" in my proposal. My author’s logic tells me my book is special in the marketplace, and not "comparable." If, anything my book is incomparable. But I can’t see stating a list of other "incomparable titles" in a book proposal. This really would be tortured contradiction.

As for using "competitive titles," I live in the Kentucky Bluegrass. In my experience, a thoroughbred author runs against his or her own abilities only. A thoroughbred author doesn’t compete against the pack among which we can find ourselves. While we authors may be thoroughbreds, admittedly our product may not be. At least, not until proven. The proof comes in the actual competition against other titles in our genre. Hence, once more in my author’s logic, the term "competitive titles" seems to be the appropriate term.

But, as I’ve said, finding an agent is like finding a girl during post puberty. To your face, she says one thing. Elsewhere, she says the opposite. In Ted’s public forum, he advises, use "comparative titles." On the Submissions page of Ted’s web site, however, Ted advises in writing to use "competitive titles." As my aunt would say, "Oh, my."

Lastly, Ted’s fourth tip is no tip at all. If he requests a book proposal, Ted asks for no more than a week to review it, he says. Fair trade! I’ll forego an author tip any day for a prompt review of my submitted proposal that’s been requested. This must be the agent in Ted rising to the surface. He’s not Moses laying down the four commandments for nonfiction submissions. He’s Ted Weinstein, the literary agent. He’s a negotiator!

I wish I had met Ted Weinstein long before I met all those post puberty girls I once pursued.

This post, by Justine Larbalestier, originally appeared on her site on 5/20/09.

Daphne over at the Longstocking blog was talking about the Worst Review Ever blog and mentioned her shock at the meanness of some of the reviews:

I’m actually a reviewer for Publishers Weekly and while I’ve read some things that were kind of poorly constructed, I’ve never had even an urge to be even half this harsh, not even secretly if I strongly disliked the book. Too much work goes into a book for anything to warrant this kind of nastiness and seriously nothing is so bad it deserves to be called “a candy-coated turd.”

I have condemned books in stronger language than that. When I hate a book, I really hate a book. I totally get writing such vicious reviews. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I don’t write reviews and only discuss books on this blog if I love them: the knowledge that were I to write an honest review of a book I hate I would most definitely hurt other writers’ feelings, alienate their fans, and lose friends. Also the YA world is small and writing a bad review of another YA writer’s book leaves you open to charges of sour grapes. Life’s too short.

I say that as someone who has received very mean reviews. I know exactly how much it hurts. Reviews have made me cry and scream and kick my (thankfully imaginary) dog (poor Elvis, he knows I love him). But I believe people are moved to write such nasty reviews because of the intensity of their relationship with books. That’s awesome!

I feel that too. When I read a book I was expecting to love and it sucks I feel betrayed. When I read a book in a beloved series and the characters are suddenly transformed beyond recognition and there seems to have been no editing at all and the writing has gone to hell, I am OUTRAGED. I want to kick the editor and the author. On the scale of things, I think writing a mean review about the book is way better than assault.

Passionate reviews, good or bad, are fabulous. It’s great that people care enough to rant or rave about a book. I don’t think it’s unprofessional to vent your spleen at a book. Some eviscerations of books are wonderfully well written and a total pleasure to read. And some passionate raves about books are appallingly badly constructed. One of the reviews of my books that embarrasses me the most was a rave. An extraordinarily badly written rave in a professional location¹ which so mischaracterised my book that it was unrecognisable. The reviewer clearly loved the book. They also clearly didn’t understand it. No review has annoyed me as much as that one.

Read the rest of the post (and the footnote) on Justine Larbalestier’s site.

Hi. I’ve been to this site often, but just joined the forum.

I’ve posted a question under "Selling" and hope to get some replies. Please check it out.

I’ve self-published two novels; neither doing especially well, but I haven’t done too much marketing. (Life Without Music and All Out of Heart, both at Amazon if anyone’s interested.)

I also write for a living — marketing, p.r., journalistm, and do some editing.

My personal opinion is traditional publishing is on its last leg… But what do we have to replace it? New models — paying models!! — have to evolve somehow.

 

This essay, by Lethe Bashar, originally appeared on his The Blog of Innocence on 5/18/09.

I have a confession to make.

I haven’t been able to finish reading an entire book in over three months.

My compulsive and ardent participation on the Internet, writing blogs, commenting, publishing poems, and reading others’ work, seems to have something to do with this.

Mostly my reading these days is confined to the well-written columns of The New York Times. I am a New York Times enthusiast and reading the newspaper coincides perfectly with my short span of attention.

A couple weeks ago, I grew interested in the phenomenon of "mass amateurism" on the Web and I wanted to investigate it. I asked a couple prominent literary bloggers, Nigel Beale from Nota Bene Books and Andrew Seal, from Blographia Literaria, to write essays for the Arts and Culture Webzine I edit, called "Escape into Life."

In Nigel’s essay, he quotes the author Andrew Keen from "The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture". And while I won’t re-quote Keen here because the message is in the title, I would like to respond based on my own experience of the last couple years, and how my behavior has changed in regards to the medium of the Internet.

From college onward, I delved into literature as if it were a contact sport, devouring the classics with fervor and intensity. I majored in English, which gave me somewhat of a background in reading these authors, but I went beyond my studies to read European classics most of which weren’t taught in my classes.

I loved French and Russian realism. I relished the imaginative powers, the ability of these great writers to create worlds inside their fiction. My favorite authors were Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola in the French tradition; and Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in the Russian.

Literary realism became my opium; I seemed to be able to live off of it forever; indulging in these beautiful and convincing worlds. Intoxicated I would spend days in the library reading, losing track of time and forgetting everything that pained me in my trivial life.

The days of literary intoxication may be over, however. I recall them with a sort of nostalgia but I can no longer enter those worlds. I refuse to abandon myself to them; I don’t have the patience to read Zola’s meticulous story-telling or Tolstoy’s epic handling of characters and events.

What has happened since? Have I changed? Have I lost my ability to engage in culture and art?

The Internet has definitely changed the way I read and what I read. But it has also changed my view of myself from a passive receiver of "culture" to an active participant and creator of it.

In many ways, I’ve become the epitome of the amateur artist on the Web. I publish everything; poetry, essays, novels, even some sketches. And like many bloggers, I bask in the freedom to express my thoughts, my impressions, my art.

I poignantly remember a creative writing college professor once telling me–after I announced my desire to become a professional writer–"You won’t publish for another ten years. I’ve seen the corpses."

And so, now it is with a certain exuberance and defiance that I publish freely on the Web, all with the click of a button.

To me, the proliferation of artistic expression, the videos on YouTube, the online novels, the loads of bad poetry, cannot be equated with a loss or diminishment of culture but instead a replenishment of it. "More artists, more culture," I say–even if the great majority of those artists are naive and unskilled. The individual acts of creativity, that’s what’s important, and with more people creating, I see the phenomenon of mass amateurism as a boon.
 

Read the rest of the essay on The Blog of Innocence.

This article, by Mike Resnick, originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Jim Baen’s Universe.

I met a young man at a recent convention. He had submitted a story he thought was wonderful to Jim Baen’s Universe, and it had been turned down. Never got as far as Eric or me.

Okay, these things happen. Lots. For every would-be writer who can sell a story, there are dozens who never will. He decided he was one of them, and told me he’d wiped the story from his computer. Well, maybe he should have.

But let me give you a little hint: if you don’t have faith in your story, why should anyone else—like, for example, an editor? First impressions are important . . . but it’s last impressions that count. I’m not saying that every rejected story is a misunderstood gem, but a story that remains in a desk drawer or a computer file (or gets wiped) never has a chance of being understood or misunderstood.

Ever hear of a novel called Up the Down Staircase? It spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list, and was a major motion picture starring Sandy Dennis, back in the bygone days when she was a major motion picture actress.

That was a last impression. You know how many times the book was turned down?

88.

You know how it finally sold? The author, Bel Kaufman, showed it to her minister’s wife, whose brother happened to be peripherally connected to the publishing industry, and one thing led to another, and suddenly the 88-times-rejected manuscript was the Number One seller in the country. I guess it’s lucky that the author didn’t burn the damned thing after the 50^th or 75^th turndown after all.

You think that just happens in other fields?

Read the rest of the article on Jim Baen’s Universe, and if you like it, consider making a donation or signing up for a subscription.

This article, by Kelly Jane Torrance, originally appeared in The Washington Times on 5/22/09.

Headlines bring news every week of another industry failing. One, though, is doing better than ever — self-publishing.

On Tuesday, the bibliographic information company Bowker released statistics showing that last year, for the first time, more books were released by on-demand publishers than by traditional ones.

Traditional publishers released fewer books in 2008 than in 2007 — 275,232 new books, a drop of 3.2 percent. However, on-demand publishers, the route many writers take to self-publish, released an astounding 132 percent more — 285,394 in 2008.

Self-publishing used to be derided as "vanity publishing." No longer. Self-published books finally are getting more respect, thanks to two things — belt-tightening in the publishing industry and technology that makes it easier to publish and promote books electronically.

The big publishers have laid off scores of employees since last year’s financial meltdown, and at least one, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has announced a freeze on buying new manuscripts.

"Publishers are going into hibernation right now," said Jason Boog, an editor at the publishing blog GalleyCat, to The Washington Times a few months ago. "While they hibernate, a lot of writers aren’t going to have a place to publish."

Some already are looking elsewhere. Wil Wheaton declares, "The incredible ease of distribution online and the fact that more authors — and actually, all creative people — can reach their audience and their customers more easily and more directly than at any other time in history, I think makes self-publishing an option that can be considered in the first round of choices rather than the last resort it’s been perceived as up until, let’s say, 1998 to 2001."

The writer and actor — best known as Wesley Crusher on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" — has self-published all but one of his books, which include the memoir "Just a Geek." Mr. Wheaton, who made a new name for himself as one of the earliest bloggers, researched the industry after deciding to publish eight years ago. "What I saw repeated was the truism that books sell as well as their authors promote them," he says, "whether you’re publishing yourself and receiving the lion’s share of the profits or published by a big publisher and receiving a tiny portion of them."

He thought his renown as an actor actually would hurt his chances of being taken seriously as a writer by a big publisher, so he decided to go it alone.

"The first book was an overwhelming success," he says. "If you combine ‘the long tail’ with what Kevin Kelly calls ‘the 1,000 true fans model,’ it’s really realistic and reasonable for creative people who are willing to work really hard to be successful via self-publishing, whether that’s books or music or movies." In other words, an artist can make a living selling his or her niche product to a small but devoted group of people.

Read the rest of the article, which includes some quotes from Publetariat founder April L. Hamilton, on The Washington Times site.