Some miscellaneous thoughts.  You know, those things that hit me while flying back across the country and waiting for American Airlines to find us an open gate to de-plane at Washington National (I refuse to call it Washington Regan so please don’t write and correct me):

Editors and agents agreed that the market for new writers [...]

Editors and agents at the conference spend a lot of time telling writers not to chase trends.  Good advice.  Now, here are some trends people were talking about:  medievals are making a comeback, chick lit mysteries are in demand, folks are waiting for westerns to come back strong (K Duffy at Kensington and J Enderlin [...]

First, some info about Kensington’s new erotica line.  If you want the free book info, skip ahead.   The erotica line still does not have a name.  It launches in January 2006.  The covers are amazing.  They’re looking for novellas and single titles.  The basic word counts are 25,000 for novellas and 90,000 for single title [...]

The first day of the conference is always a short one.  After a morning of chatting, mingling and workshop attending, the scheduled activities end until morning.  Notice I did not mention the lunch.  It sucked as all conferences lunches do.  The speaker, Debbie Macomber, was inspirational.  Her story of skating on the edge of poverty [...]

So, we’re off for a few days of fun in California pre-RWA conference.  I’ll pick up with some conference thoughts - to the extent I have to anything worth saying and to the extent the internet service at the Reno Hilton works. 
Until then, how’s this for innovation:  put writers together in an anthology, tell [...]

If you’re not an avid reader of Entertainment Weekly  - which is hard to imagine - you may not know that Stephen King has a regular column.  He doesn’t appear every week but drops in often enough to remind us all just how scary he is.  Well, actually, his words usually aren’t too terrifying, except [...]

Ever wonder how many times a year someone is declared this year’s "bright light in fiction" or some other stupid thing.  As an avid reader of reviews - it’s almost risen to the level of being an obsession - I stumbled across this one in the August issue of Vogue.  Not my usual book recommendation [...]

I wonder if we’ve gone too far.  If authors are too accessible to the public.  If, as readers, we know so much about the person writing that we can’t always separate that from what’s being written. 
If you have a favorite author you can now track that person to the ends of the Earth.  Really, [...]

There’s realism and then there’s the concept of too much information.  A few years back I heard about a memoir where author Kathryn Harrison described her love affair with her father.  Yeah, I couldn’t say ewww fast enough either.  I quickly forgot about the book - happily - until I read reviews of the author’s [...]

There’s either been a slight change in publishing or I’ve become more aware, but everywhere I look there are novellas and short story collections.  Sure, the literary world, general fiction and romance all have mounds of single titles.  You can find a 300 or 400 or 500 page novel in just about any genre without [...]