Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i The Writer

Writer and environmental historian Jessica J. Lee believes nature writing has a diversity problem. Having lived all over the world and sat on numerous panels at book festivals, the British-Canadian-Taiwanese author of Two Trees Make a Forest: On Memory, Migration and Taiwan (Hamish Hamilton, 2020), decided in 2018 to found The Willowherb Review, a digital literary magazine devoted to nature writing by people of color. “We’re interested in amplification of voices rather than bemoaning the state of diversity in nature writing,” she says of herself and her two-person staff. “There’s such a strong history of nature writing being a certain way, and that trope gets reproduced over and over,” she adds. “What I’ve really enjoyed so far is the huge range of submissions from all over the world – not…

Making the decision to self-publish your book can be nerve-wracking. How do you go about ensuring the manuscript is error free? What do you do about cover design and eBook format? How exactly do you obtain an ISBN and get your final product into stores? Fortunately, Publishing University – an annual conference put on by the Independent Book Publishers Association – has answers to all of these questions and so many more. The three-day event gathers industry experts together with authors for workshops and panels, keynotes and social events with the goals of demystifying the self-publishing process and building a community dedicated to helping one another succeed. It’s an annual event, held in a different city each year. In 2021, the event takes place in Orlando, Florida, and will likely…

Last chance to attend Summer School! We hope you’ve been enjoying Summer School thus far. If you’ve missed the other installments of our virtual learning series for writers, you still have one more chance to take advantage of this free program. Join us at the end of August for our final session of the exciting series – both previous events have hit max capacity, so be sure to show up early to reserve your spot! Watch writermag.com/webinars for more details later in the month. Coming soon: A brand-new contest from The Writer Could you write a story in less than 100 words? This fall, we’re excited to launch our first-ever 100-word contest, inviting writers of both fiction and nonfiction to test their storytelling skills in an extremely small space. Look…

Mike McDermott: I took a risk. You, you see all the angles, you never have the fucking stones to play one. Joey Knish: Stones? You little punk. I’m not playing for the thrill of fucking victory here. I owe rent, alimony, child support. I play for money. My kids eat. I got stones enough not to chase cards, actions of fucking pipe dreams, of winning the World Series [of Poker] on ESPN. —From Rounders (1998) It’s unwise to visit Twitter during happy times, so it’s questionable at best to visit the social media platform as the coronavirus pandemic extends its stay. Every week, as another round of layoffs is announced at a media behemoth, someone bemoans the future of writing as a profession. Freelancing gets a postmortem, too. There is usually a…

Since its early days with now-classic authors like Jane Austen and Walt Whitman to its later rise in the early part of the 21st century, self-publishing has proven to be a viable option for authors who want to have control over how and when they get their books into the hands of readers. Self-publishing a book can be as easy as uploading your completed manuscript (edited or not) and creating a cover using a free template through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) on Amazon. But that isn’t the best way to become a successful self-published author. When you decide to self-publish, you become the publisher and, ultimately, a small business owner. You are now responsible for all aspects of the book, including editing, formatting, cover design, marketing, etc. Like any small…

Making friends as an adult is hard. Making friends as an adult during a worldwide pandemic is even harder. As a result, some writers are starting to build relationships a la famous authors of yore – Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen – by writing old-fashioned letters delivered via snail mail. But while you could dash off missives on that sad spiral-bound notebook like you’re passing notes in eighth-grade algebra, we think we can all agree it’s more fun to receive proper messages on proper paper. Brighten your new pen pal relationship with these writerly stationery sets, postcards, pens, and more. HOW TO FIND A PEN PAL 1 Start with people you already know. Put a call out on social media and see if anyone’s interested in striking up a pen palship…

“I like gray characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.”—George R. R. Martin Heroes andvillains–these terms have less currency today than in years past, since most fiction authors tend to think of characters as a mix of good and bad, not just plain good or bad. In other words, if you’re writing modern fiction and creating a protagonist or antagonist, don’t make your protagonist too good, or your antagonist too bad. Two questions: According to Susan Neville, short story writer and scholar at Butler University, without the villain, there is no story. “Every system has a hairline crack (every marriage, every institution, every friendship), and the villain takes advantage by inserting himself into that crack and breaking the world apart,” she says. “The Garden…

Self-publishing can sometimes feel like shouting over a crowd, desperately trying to have your voice break through the noise. When shuffling around the public’s periphery, dancing among the bustle of other indie authors, traditional published ones, and all of the other clamor that the internet provides, how does someone steal even an ounce of attention? Well, for some, you fire up your camera. YouTube has become a launchpad for so many indie authors – enough that “AuthorTube” has become a recognizable moniker for this corner of the site – but few have had the success that Jenna Moreci has enjoyed. Wise as she is witty, Jenna has built herself up as a prime example for success in the AuthorTube community with her 215,000 subscribers and her self-published sophomore novel, The…