This is the kind of half-time show I’d much rather see during the Super Bowl.
Make sure to watch until the end. It is truly incredible.
Blog
Five Myths About an Agent’s Rejection
1.) The agent hates me. Unless you approached her and said something along the lines of, "You and your kids are ugly and you have lousy taste in manuscripts," a rejection shouldn't be personal.
But if you are worried that you unintentionally offended an agent or other publishing professional, take action. Email to let him know you have been worried about why you may have been the cause of …
Your Writing Team: Creating an Advisory Board
As I write this, we’re smack-dab in the middle of football season. The town I grew up in was—and still is—a football town. I LOVE football. I was in the band, so marched at all our school games from junior high through college. My friends and I played football. I even, a few times, ran the chain for JV games in highschool. It was great fun. But more than that, I saw the importance of having a team …
Real vs. Imaginary
Simone Weil was being quite profound when she commented:
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
I can see the truth in those words in just about every book, TV program or movie. Anywhere a story is told, fictional villains or real heroes are the most interesting …
Fun Fridays – October 25, 2013
Too cool. Playing a piano and a cello on the Great Wall of China!
The music is a combination of the song "Oogway Ascends" from the "Kung Fu Panda" film soundtrack and Frederick Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28 No. 20 in C minor. (The music really builds starting at the 1:07 mark.)
Creative genius.
[I apologize in advance for any ads that may pop up. I cannot control how YouTube monetizes these …
My Amazing Fake Day
I've been intrigued by some blogs and articles about how Facebook makes people depressed because everyone else's lives seem so perfect. I hope that no one thinks the sum of my life is reflected in two recent Facebook posts that my uncle killed a bear on our family farm in Southern Virginia and here in Northern Virginia, we are host a family of walking stick bugs. I took great comfort in the …
Your Writing Team
You've heard it before: “Writing is a solitary endeavor.” Yes, that’s true. The responsibility for getting the words on the page rests on the writer’s shoulders. And yet, we don’t have to be Lone Rangers. In fact, if you think about it, the Lone Ranger wasn't alone! He had Tonto. And a whole network of sheriffs and people that he’d helped, all of whom supported and were rooting for him.
Anyone …
Castor Oil for the Soul
I am taking a big risk here, knowing there are authors and avid book readers looking at this post.
Columbia University Press polled hundreds of editors, writers, booksellers, librarians, literary critics, and general readers in order to produce a list of the ten most boring books of all time among the great classics. The winners were:
Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan
Faust, Goethe
Don …
You Are Essential
On Sunday our pastor's sermon was on 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. Although in this passage, St. Paul writes about how each person is a special part of the body of Christ, with a comparison to how all the parts of the human body work together, I couldn't help but think of how essential we all are to the publishing process:
Writers: Without authors' creativity and courage, no one would have a book to …
The Oddest Profession
Guest blog by Stephanie Grace Whitson
Writing is the oddest profession in the universe. Why? Because whether or not I get to keep doing it (in the traditional, royalty-paying part of the world I inhabit) has nothing to do with whether or not I’m good at it. Why? Because the one thing that reigns over my career is sales numbers, and I can’t affect sales enough to impress publishers (i.e., by …