ISBW #142 – Feedback!

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It’s another feedback week!

• 00:06: ISBW is brought to you by GoTo Meeting
• 00:18: ISBW #142
• 00:49: State of the Mur: busy. Artist’s Way, Artist’s Way Video Podcasts, Artist’s Way on Facebook, ISBW, short stories & a novella, waiting for feedback on novel, and, you know, life.
• 02:16: GoTo Meeting Promo
• 03:04 Promo: N.K. Jemisin’s novel The Ten Thousand Kingdoms published by Orbit Books.
• 04:05 Feedback: legality of fan fiction (it is a copyright violation, but authors may not care unless you try to get paid for it); listener Ross made a New Year’s Resolution to get in front of his computer & write every day and it seems to be working (yay Ross!); ISBW’s show notes writer CKHB on agents misplacing manuscripts (yes, it happens! keep track of your submissions!); looking for advice on finding the right balance when writing short stories (suggested reading: Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress); where to start an epic fantasy (consider starting at the moment the protagonist’s life changes); thoughts on not taking rejection too seriously; advice for people whose style is easily affected by what they read (it’s a new-writer thing); how many main characters is too many; keeping parents away from one’s writing or warning them about content; how to find literary magazines that like myth-based poetry (CKHB suggests trying the Duotrope’s Digest search engine); using Wordle as a method for creating titles; ISBW now on streaming Stitcher Radio for smart phones; standard manuscript format — Times New Roman or Courier New? 250 words/page or precise word count? (CKHB’s research agrees with Mur’s: no agent or editor has ever rejected something just for being in TNR or Courier, and manuscript formatting expert Anne Mini at Author! Author! says that you estimate word count as 250 words/page for TNR, 200 words/page for Courier); iPad and software development concerns; the writing activities that count towards one’s 10,000 hours of practice to become a “master” of the craft; listener Lincoln wrote 5 novels since he started listening to ISBW (yay Lincoln!); Mur will be speaking about podcasting at Write Now! 2010, the Triangle Area Freelancers’ Annual Non-Fiction Conference on March 27th (and TAF President Don Vaughan will be interviewed on an upcoming episode of ISBW); a poet transitioning to fiction asks about beginnings & characterization (suggested writing books: the Nancy Kress book, Orson Scott Card’s Characters & Viewpoint and other books from the Writer’s Market collection), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay books); where to find Beta readers.

Now, go write. And when in doubt, eat a cookie, THEN write.

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