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10 Stages of Grief: The Editor’s Note Edition
So let’s say you’ve made it through the first hoops and now your Amazing and Brilliant First Novel is sitting on the desk of a Real Life Editor at a Real Live Publishing House. Your contract has been framed and placed on the fireplace mantle between your dusty wedding photo and dustier 5th Grade Spelling Bee Champion trophy. You’ve spent the first part of your advance on the clothes you just have to have for that inevitable booksigning at the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln, Nebraska. And you’ve ordered business cards that list your occupation as “Author” to replace the ones that said “Writer.” Then you get the email. The…
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A Book, Some Editorial Advice and a Picture of a Kitty & a Puppy
It’s Friday, which means absolutely nothing to a freelancer since all days end up looking the same. But for the sake of the rest of the working world, I’m going to play along. Hooray for the weekend! (For the record, I almost never use exclamation marks. This is not because F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote of them, “An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes,” but because I rarely feel all that exclamatory. So, if you see one on this blog, it’s either a sign of the apocalypse or a snide comment on the sentence that precedes it. Listen for the sound of hoofbeats. If you hear them…
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My Brilliant Idea
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austin and Seth Grahame-Smith was a stroke of genius. Argue all you want about whether or not the book is any good, you can’t deny the brilliance of the concept. This got me thinking – what if, instead of merely adding zombies to an existing property, an author took the best of two novels and wove them together with a few twists of his own to create an Entirely New Work of Fiction? I mean, it would be at least two times better than either of the originals, right?* Here are the ideas I’ve had so far: Great Expectations and the Art of…