Author: JRVogt

One of the things I love about working in publishing (more than the copious amounts of free diet coke I swig during the day) is the fact that just down the hall from my cubicle there is a bookshelf stacked high and mighty with books and advance review copies (ARCs)…

Plot–the core of your story. The events that take you from beginning to end. Often a novel-sized story involves a rather complicated bundle of events that doesn’t so much resemble a beautiful tapestry, but more a ball of yarn that a hundred demonic kittens have strewn across a tar pit.…

All writers have those days where you stare at the screen and the fingers are poised on the keyboard, and you went to bed last night knowing right where you were going to pick up from in the story…and…nothing. The words have their heads under the pillows and are pleading…

Fighting some writer’s block lately? Need an inspirational kick start? Then this is a little game/contest that I really wish I had thought of. However, it was the wonderful genius behind Paperback Writer who has come up with Dictionary: Impossible. How to play? Well, you can go over to her…

This post kind of ties in to my previous one about stupid characters. The whole idea that we should never insult our readers’ collective intelligences by making the characters do nonsensical things for the sake of plot. Now, the Evil Overlord List may derive a lot of its points from…

Scott Westerfeld lays out the numbers that define his career. An intriguing look at both how he has managed to reach writing full time and what it took for him to get there in a financially feasible way. If you, like me, have this as your goal, then this will…

I need to ask you all a question. I’m going to list a few authors and their series, and I need to know if it’s going to be worth my time tracking down these books to read. Thing is, most of these people are at least five or six books…

My last post got a nice response by Becky, who also had mentioned some marketing thoughts in her blog, though more on a cautionary vein…a good reminder that, in all our efforts to reach a larger audience, we shouldn’t forget that often the best writing reputations and such are built…

Two links for you to taste test. One of my ongoing fascinations in the business world is with marketing, publicity, and those other means of grabbing people by the lower lip, stapling their eyelids open and going, “Look! Look here! No, not there! Here! Where I am!” Okay. Those might…

Be honest. Have you ever made your characters do something that no one in their right mind would ever conceive of doing, much less follow through with? Did you have them do it for the sake of furthering your plot, or just to act out a silly scene you thought…