This week we talk to Pyr editor, Lou Anders!
- 01:04 State of the Mur: nearing episode 200, fundraiser, speaking at Ignite Durham, Playing For Keeps 2, outlining some upcoming work-for-hire projects
- 02:54 Sponsor: Bull Spec, a magazine of speculative fiction.
- 03:46 Keeping track of writing — versioning, and backing up.  Command Line Podcast‘s versioning program. [Mur, if you can find a link to the program itself instead of just the podcast, that would ROCK.  I can't find it.] Recommended backup resource: Dropbox.
- 13:30 Promo: Marco and the Red Granny
- 14:57 Interview: Lou Anders of Pyr Books
- What Pyr editors are looking for
- Steampunk
- Interior illustrations by J. Seamus Gallagher
- Writing for yourself vs. writing for the market
- The state of publishing/e-books
- Piracy, giving away fiction for free
- Advice for new writers
- Attendance at upcoming cons, new & upcoming Pyr releases – See the catalog of upcoming titles at Pyr!
- 1:12:24 Promo:Â The Gnome and Mrs. Meyers
- 1:13:12 Chris Miller‘s Bootstrap Chronicles: The Process
Credits:Â Â Â Producer:Â Patrick Hester, Show notes writer:Â Carrie Kei Heim Binas, Theme song:Â John Anealio
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5 Responses to ISBW #185 – Keeping Track of Writing / Lou Anders Interview
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New from the Murverse- ISBW Special #46 – Stonecoast Writer’s Residency January 31, 2012
- ISBW #230 – Feedback January 30, 2012
- Short Story Alert- Gimme Shelter January 27, 2012
Will there be show notes listing the books Mr. Anders mentioned during the interview? Thanks!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Aidan Moher, Clifton Hill and Michael, Mad Hatter, John Anealio. John Anealio said: Mur Lafferty (@mightymur) interviews Pyr Editorial Director @LouAnders on the ISBW podcast : http://bit.ly/fbOQzn [...]
Online backup is definitely the safest, but I also have a bunch of sd cards. A 2gb card is a couple dollars on Amazon and holds a few hundred million words. They’re really hard to kill and I can keep one right in my laptop without it getting in the way. There are usb readers for people without sd slots.
@Chris Miller:
Flash fiction really requires its own skill set, just as short stories require a different skill set than novels. Yes, they’re all writing, and yes, they’re all great practice in a lot of different writing skills, but the pacing and depth and subplots and plot intricacies and backstory are really different at the different story lengths. I know I had a lot of success in honing my craft by working on short stories and flash at the same time I was working on the novel, so definitely keep that up, but I had a much easier time selling the short stories than the flash. But maybe that’s just me. If getting something published is your big goal right now, I’d find open calls for anthologies and see if you can craft a story to fit what they’re looking for. (I find doing this to be like doing a logic puzzle, and I have a lot of fun with it.)
I think nothing teaches you about the publishing industry so quickly and at so little risk as publishing a bunch of short stories with different markets. Yikes. Contracts, editors, revisions, typos in the final that weren’t in the galleys, delays, royalties, taxes…all the business stuff. It’s nice to get some of that under your belt before there’s a big payday on the line.
I’m a bit confused about talk of version control issues with Scrivener – surely Scrivener’s “Snapshot” feature pretty much does the job for you? My only quibble with it is that it’s just a date-stamped backup, whereas with a major project you might want to track several different version ‘forks’, so you end up with a tree structure, along with metadata about the differences where the paths diverge.