“Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo were all happy to carry my books without DRM, and on terms that gave you the same rights you got when buying paper editions. Sony and Apple refused to carry my books without DRM — even though my publisher and I both asked them to.”
“The thing is, this couldn’t have happened in the print world. We would have had to get all of our current print publisher’s approval (because of no-compete and first look clauses), had to have found a buyer, and had to have toned down some of the violence (this sucker is violent!) But doing this on our own, we have complete control, don’t have to answer to anybody, and can write a novel just for the sheer joy of it. Then we can release it immediately after completion, and get the lion’s share of the royalties.”
Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish mustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across. […] Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day … fifty the day after that … and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.
Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.
Novel writing is mostly a “one day” event. As in “One day, I’d like to write a novel.” Here’s the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It’s just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists.
— From NaNoWriMo FAQ
“Day three, ten a.m.: no sleep last night. Nothing else seems substantial anymore except for the words on the laptop screen. The backs of my eyeballs feel prickly, suggesting complete and unforgiving fatigue. My brain went AWOL hours earlier and I keep omitting words like ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘or’, and ‘of’ from sentences. Yet I am ecstatic—an intense happiness burgeoning in me from too much caffeine, too little sleep, and having just spent two and a half days in a dream world of my own creation. As of right now, I am a novelist.”
There are a couple of funny parody websites appeared on the Web that I wanted to highlight:
Check who or what writer, animal or household object you most write like with this highly advanced statistical analysis tool which was actually genuinely written by a guy with a real PhD which has some statistics.
(Thanks for a laugh, @richardclegg!)
This one is funny, but, unfortunately, has too many ads.
“When is the last time you did something creative on your computer — written a blog post or a letter, worked in Photoshop, or even read a long article — without allowing yourself to be interrupted by the realtime internet?
I don’t really remember what I was I thinking about during all of those moments when I used to be alone with my thoughts. But I have a feeling that the quiet moments once reserved for daydreaming and random thoughts were important factors in one’s creativity and general mental health.”
“But if print goes the way of the dodo, publishers will have to rely on ebooks. Plain old non-enriched ebooks. And if they keep offering authors 17.5% royalty on the cover price, they soon won’t have any authors to publish. After all, authors can get 70% on their own. And it doesn’t take 18 months to release it. Plus the author gets to pick the price, cover, and title.”
