Novel Voices

I approached "Novel Voices" by Jennifer Levasseur with a lot of enthusiasm. The premise is terrific. The authors interviewed 17 award-winning authors and gathered the collected wisdom and insights into one book.

I was quite disappointed. The problem for me is that the novelists were all literary authors. I hadn't heard of a single writer. I didn't recognize anything they'd written. Their bibliographies listed volumes of poetry and collections of short stories along with a few novels. In short, they wrote the kinds of things I don't read and don't write.

I suppose this book has a lot of value for those who aspire to write literary fiction, but my tastes and interests are quite commercial, and I found the book irrelevant and unhelpful. There is nothing wrong with the book itself; I am simply not the target audience.

I'm afraid I can't offer anything specific. I read the book five or six days ago and I remember almost nothing. It wasn't long before I was skimming, looking for something I could relate to, and failing to find it.

O Brave New Blog

I will be taking this blog in a bold new direction in 2010. Some bloggers might worry about alienating their loyal readers with such a move, but I, of course, have no readers.

I have been writing on assignment for Whitesmoke during 2009, creating the same kind of content that I've been posting to this blog. It's a scramble to find enough to write about for Whitesmoke. I don't have enough topics to blog as well without repeating myself. Plus, I'm getting a bit bored with this stuff, since I'm writing about it all the time now. So, I'll be taking "Writing Tips" in a different direction.

Starting immediately, the focus of this blog will be the lessons I learn as a fiction writer who is close to breaking into publication. There will be reviews of books on writing, writing resources, and general insights that I glean as an author.

Since readership quite literally can't get worse, I'm confident that this step is a move in the right direction.

Are you reading this? For the love of God, post a comment.

Thanks,

Brent

Bugs and Words

Etymology - the study of words and their origins
Entomology - the study of insects