Still offline, so leaving you with some writers on writing, words of wisdom, whatever you want to call them! Have a great weekend!

It always amuses me when the status quo preaches about how the gatekeepers of New York, in their valiant efforts to curtail the so-called Tsunami of Crap, boast how they’re responsible for safeguarding literature and culture and are solely responsible for bringing books to the masses.
The opposite is the truth. The Big 5 are censors. For decades, their paper book distribution oligopoly limited what was available to readers. Their “curation”, which they’ve touted as a feature, has actually been a gigantic bug. A censorship bug, which prevented readers from deciding for themselves what’s worthy and what isn’t.
It’s so liberating, so intoxicating, to be able to write the kind of book I want to, without being subjected to the whims of the gatekeepers. Imagine if the Internet only allowed certain websites to be published based on what a select handful of people deemed appropriate. We’d have a far smaller, much less interesting World Wide Web.
Yet, even with the number of websites surpassing 1 billion, we can all still find worthy URLs that interest us.
Self-publishing doesn’t lead to a Tsunami of Crap. It leads to freedom, more choices, better prices, and the opportunity for more writers and readers to indulge in their whims and passions.

– Joe Konrath

It takes a certain personality type to persevere through the solitude and negative feedback. I often say I’m a writing junkie, but more accurately, I’m a storytelling junkie. I consume and create story in equal measures. Take my stories away, I’ll wither and die.
Most people have a real life that writing gets in the way of. I have a writing life that real events interrupt. Most writers who have committed a novel or two find the writing life not to their taste.
Solitude and making things up is not for everyone.
Nor should it be.

– Kris Rush

And here’s the best news of all: I don’t have to be a bestseller to make comfortable money. In the past, if I had wanted to stay home and write books full-time, I had to hope I could sell my books to thousands of people. Now, I can make good money selling to hundreds. And hundreds of people is do-able. It might take some time to get there—I put my first story up on Amazon in 2009, so I’m into year 5 here—but it can be done.

– M.C.A. Hogart

We will never stop taking risks.
And we keep writing and putting up new work. And that’s the most important of everything.
We do our best to keep up with everything new coming into publishing, but we don’t chase every fad. And we don’t write to market. We write what we love.
And it seems to work just fine in the long run.
We have fun. We make a lot of money. That’s also fun.
And we do our best to help others find their own road, even if it is different from what we are doing. Every writer is different. And thankfully these days, there is no one path.

– Dean Wesley Smith

You don’t have to be perfect. Just perfect for yourself. You can achieve this personal perfection by having your own yardstick of what success means to you. But the important thing is that the yardstick have notches that take into account successes that are big as well as small. Think that writer who sold several thousand copies on Kindle is successful? Great. But if your own pdf has been downloaded 67 times, that is no small feat either. Imagine, at least 67 people in the world have thought your words worth paying their hard-earned cash for. And at least 67 people in the world have benefited in some way from your creation. To me, that sounds good.

– Devyani Borade

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
– Raymond Chandler

And it’s WoW Sunday – or writers on writing, words of wisdom, whatever you want to call it. Enjoy these writers’ quotes and have a great Sunday!

But the one position I never write from is the one-book writer. It’s a position I honestly don’t understand. And that gets me in trouble with some of you who read this blog. Some of you think I don’t do enough to support my “book”; some of  you believe I don’t understand what it’s like to be a beginner (what, was I born fully formed from the forehead of Zeus?); some of you think I could never understand how hard writing is.
I understand all of that. What I don’t understand is why some of you believe that your book (singular) is a sacred and holy text. Why you believe that once you’ve published your one book, you’re done.
– Kristine Katryn Rusch

I have never been able to understand how people can complain about being lonely or bored; there are so many interesting things to do, so many fascinating people to know. I love my work, and I hope to go on doing it till I drop at the age of 99.
– Barbara Mertz

The one thing a creator can bring to the table when everybody else has all the money and power is a centeredness and the ability to walk away. Never sit at a table you can’t walk away from.
– Joss Whedon

The key to success is keeping at it until you succeed. For me, that took over twenty years of hard work, and I still fail all the time. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough.
Keep writing, keep experimenting, try to learn from your failures, and never give up.
– Joe Konrath

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. — Ira Glass

no guests, no artworks, so some more writers wisdom… Have a wonderful Sunday! 🙂

I started writing a new book last week. I’d been between projects with other writing-related activities taking up my time. What I didn’t realize until I immersed myself in Chapter 1 was that I need to write. It’s a stress-release for me. If you’re a writer, you write because writing is like breathing. You simply have to do it.
But will it make you rich? If you’re looking at the success stories of the few rich and famous authors, you’re going to feel like a failure from Day One. There are no overnight success stories. No shortcuts. A writing career is a marathon, not a sprint. And nowadays, when the odds of a new author breaking into the Big Six are getting slimmer and slimmer, and the mid-list authors are going the way of the dodo, I decided to investigate alternate publishing methods.

– Terry Odell

I spent too many years neglecting my muse. I believed creativity was finite, that when I gave my creativity to my employer, there was none left for my art. But creativity is not a fossil fuel of finite supply that must be transported in pipelines and on ships and driven around in automobile tanks. Creative thinking, I’ve learned, begets more creative thinking.

– Patrick Ross

Focus on learning how to tell a better story while at the same time learning the business. If you keep writing and learning, eventually you will be a big name writer with a lot of books out and will have to give this same advice to the next generation of writers.So my suggestion is to stop whining about how big names have all the advantages, and start focusing on learning how to write better stories. Stop spending time on promotion and spend the time on the next short story or the next novel. Your best promotion is always your next book.

– Dean Wesley Smith

It turns out that I was entirely wrong. I was missing what I really wanted. One of the major reasons that I write is to connect with readers, not publishers. The truth is that I couldn’t care less whether New York editors and publishers like me. I don’t want to write for them. I want to write for you. The other undeniable truth is that readers could care less that my books aren’t put out by a big publisher. They read for the content, not the publishing house emblem.

– Jessica Park @ Indiereader.com

Here is what most writers forget. You are the boss of your own story. Not the other writers in your critique group. Not the famous author whose workshop you were lucky enough to get into at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Not even your mother-in-law who comes into your house while you are at work and vacuums the mattresses because somebody has to protect her grandchildren from dust mites. When it comes to applying feedback, you — and only you — are the one who gets to determine what stays and what goes in your story. And that is a good thing.

– Joni B. Cole

And let’s start the new year with some writerly quotes! Here’s to a productive writing year to all the writers out there!

I love writing. I loved it for the 12 years where I didn’t sell a single thing, and I’ve loved it for the 12 years I’ve been a professional. I have all the conceits that every writer has. I think about my characters as if they’re real people. I dream about scenes. I secretly believe my stories are the best in the world. I laugh at my own jokes, cry at the emotional parts, and often dislocate my elbow patting myself on the back after a good bit of dialog or a fun twist. Being a writer does more than define me; it isn’t a job, it’s a way of life. And when I put my life out there for the world to see, I want it to be the very best that I am capable of. I want readers to enjoy it as much as I have. I want every chapter, every scene, every sentence to be deliberate, to convey exactly what I want it to convey.

– Joe Konrath

Agents and editors think they know what readers want. They don’t always know. Readers know what readers want, and they’re expressing their wants by buying books written by indie authors. Give yourself a hardy pat on the back if you’ve completed a manuscript, but the big applause goes to our devoted fans and readers. Without them, we would be nothing.

– Carol Davis Luce

“The point here is that you do not have to feel as though you are in competition with the entire world. You don’t NEED the entire world to be a successful writer. What you need is an audience—just enough of an audience, mind you—who reads your words, is changed by them and wants to come back for more.”

– Tracy Hickman

An audience can’t be goosed. The audience must be built. And then it must be nurtured. Audiences aren’t fickle. They’ll return when they see a notice of something new from one of their favorites. But if their favorites cease to produce, the audience will move onto something else.

Because you must remember one thing about any audience: its free time and its entertainment dollars are finite. So if you fail to produce work your audience loves, eventually your audience will move onto other things. It won’t abandon you: audiences are very loyal. But your audience will think you abandoned it.

– Kris Rusch

It’s hard to fault his dollars-and-cents logic. But when I start thinking along these lines, I try to take a step back and remind myself that I never got into this business for the money in the first place. I became a writer so that I could do what I wanted, and if I reach a point where my “success” as a writer keeps me from doing what I want to do, there would seem to be something seriously wrong with the turn my career has taken.

– Lawrence Block

… and it’s more writers quotes! To interrupt the series of interviews with fellow Wyrd Worlds authors (but we shall continue, so stay tuned) – here’s the monthly feature of words of wisdom or writers on writing! 🙂 Have a great Sunday!

People fret about the disappearance of one ecosystem: the closure of stores, the slimming down of book sections in newspapers, or Oprah cancelling her book club, and don’t take into account the diverse, decentralized, vibrant system that is taking its place through crowdsourced reviews, hugely popular book blogs, Kindle fan newsletters that have fifty thousand subscribers, Kindle owner Facebook Pages with thirty thousand fans, e-reader forums with tens of thousands of members, huge social networks exclusively for books, as well as the millions and millions of conversations about books and their authors which are happening every day on social media, and by email.

It’s a chaotic and messy recommendation engine, but it’s also one that allows word-of-mouth to spread like wildfire. And it doesn’t care who published the book.

– David Gaughran

To become a professional fiction writer, you must become a major risk-taker without fear of failure or a care in the world what anyone else thinks of you or your writing.

– Dean Wesley Smith

Because all that tells me is this: the more I write and publish, the more readers will want what I write.

And oh, that makes me happy. It keeps my butt in the chair, and my fingers on the keyboard. It also makes me a bit crazy: I have more stories to tell than I could ever get to. I’m typing as fast as I can—and having a ball.

That’s what all the writers who’ve decided to embrace this new world will tell you. We’re having fun, some of us for the first time in years. (To me, writing has always had to be fun or there’s no point in doing it.)

– Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I don’t know if I have a specific point or conclusion, I’m just kind of rambling here. I guess my point is, everyone is passionate about at least one thing. Even if it’s a passion for the desire not to be passionate about anything. If yours is writing, creating, building, and dreaming, embrace it. Live through the pain, celebrate through the joy, and know that every up and down feeds your love for the written word.

– Loralie Hall

This joy, this enthusiasm, having it hurt when I can’t sit down to write, that’s the way it was over thirty years ago when I used to hammer stories out on an old typewriter. It was what made me write a novel in longhand back when I was in high school. This is what sparks the light in the eyes of students who come to my classes, and fuels the secret smile writers have when alone and an idea strikes them.

It’s been gone for a bit. I am so thankful it’s back.

– Michael Stackpole

So, I skipped August, and in spite of the list of guests, I thought I’d restart the “WoW Sunday”, which, for the newcomers, isn’t what you might think, but Words of Wisdom or Writers on Writing – a collection of five writerly quotes. Which goes well between writers’ interviews, don’t you think? Here’s this now monthly feature for your eyes only – five writers’ quotes.

Don’t buy into the myth that writers are a dime a dozen. There is only one you. As long as people crave stories, as long as we need books, we are going to need writers. These days there are so many more ways to publish and so many more ways to connect to the readers. The future is bright.

–  Agent Wendy Lawton @ Books&Such

That is what I have been saying now for a year, and it scares hell out of me to have a major publisher agree. And base his very survival and the survival of his company on being right.

I had honestly hoped I was going to be wrong. I still do, because in my opinion, the best writer is a writer who has choices, who can move into a future and write what he or she wants, and sell it either directly to readers or to a publisher. That is how it is working for me and Kris and Mike and Barry and Joe and a number of others who follow here. We haven’t gone knee-jerk indie or defend-the-fort traditional.

The best is using both indie and traditional at will. The writer’s will.

– Dean Wesley Smith

I am not one of your professional patriots, you must understand. I am not a flag-waver (I don’t even own a flag) and I eschew nationalism. I’m a globalist, who believes that human beings should not divide themselves into any divisions less than “human being.” Let everyone be merely different facets of an overriding humanity.

– Isaac Asimov

I have this strange feeling that if writers spent more time on their own craft, and less time worried about how others do things differently, there would be a lot more good books being published from all directions.

– C.S.Splitter (R.I.P.)

My advice to any writer who plans to be published whether its self or traditionally: start networking NOW. Don’t wait til your book is published. Don’t wait til you have a deal. Start talking to people, start being friends and care about others around you. Draw them into conversation and encourage them. It pays back in so many ways and you know what? It makes you feel good. Because being good to others – knowing that you made someone else smile is way better than just one sale. But the real point here is that – if people like you and genuinely care about you – they will be interested in your writing.

– Cambria Hebert