So you’ve written a novel, or a story, or a comic, and you want to turn that into a career. What do you do now?

First, you need to assess your mental state. Are you strong enough to handle people seeing it? Commenting upon it? Critiquing it?

If not, don’t worry. Fear is a normal reaction. Listen to it, query it, figure out what you’re afraid of. You might need professional help here, or just a good friend that won’t hurt you.

But let’s assume that you have built up a thick skin. You can handle it. What then? (more…)

Let me share something written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Now, before I go too far here, let me clear up something. I do own a publishing company. WMG Publishing publishes all of my work. (Eventually, anyway. I do publish some things in anthologies and other venues, sometimes first.) The team there does a huge amount of advertising, usually on a budget, and always effectively. They’re refocusing their efforts because we have a new Shopify store. They’re slowly getting our 1,000 titles on the site.

Note that 1000 titles at the bottom. That’s a thousand titles put out by Kris and her husband Dean Wesley Smith. A thousand titles by two authors. And that’s not even fast. (more…)

I had fears. Big fears. Soul-crushing fears.

Let me give you an example. In 2003, I was a semi-finalist in the Writers of the Future contest. I’d sent in my story (which, BTW, predicted Bluetooth headsets 15 years before they became a thing) after months of sleepless nights and fearing what would happen.

I finished in the top 10, but I didn’t win.

Every quarter, WotF receives some 4 000 entries. My story was in the top-10 of those entries. The top 0,25%. It was judged to be better than 99,75% of all stories submitted that quarter.

But I didn’t win. (more…)

You’ve finished your first short story. You’re proud, maybe a little scared. And you have no idea what to do next. Should you start editing it? (no) Should you hire an editor? (no) Should you throw it in the trash? (no, no, and a thousand times no)

This is what you do (and I’m fully aware that I’ll get some hate for this, but this is how the writing world works):

You correct any obvious spelling and grammar mistakes, and you send it out to markets that publish this type of story.

Yes, unedited.

Why? Because right now, you’re likely not able to edit it. You don’t have the skills for it. Anything you do to it will make the story worse.

How do you get those skills? (more…)

This is a reply to John Scalzi’s post on not using art AI:s.

I’m going to stick out my head to get it chopped off: I’m somewhat AI-positive myself.

Yes, that includes writing AI:s like GPT3, too, even though I’m a writer.

The reason for this is twofold:

First, I’m leaning against the lessons from the Bittorrent debacle in the late 90’s and early 00′. A lot of powerful people screaming how music piracy would destroy music, how no musician would be able to afford a living, and we’d all lose out.

What happened? (more…)

1. Stop making excuses and write.
2. Stop whining and write.
3. Stop fucking around and write.
4. I take my own advice.

Read: Nora Robert’s Here’s How I Work on Facebook

First: write.

That’s it. Write. You’ll need to learn a lot, but writing is a craft as much as an art – you’ll learn a ton by just writing.

Second: keep writing.

The most common “mistake” prospective writers do is giving up. Learning is difficult. It can be hard. There will be parts where you feel like everything you do is crap. It might even be crap. (more…)

Ever felt like you want to tell stories, but can’t? That you’re sitting down, starting something great, all those characters dancing in your mind, but two weeks and fourteen failed starts later, you have nothing to show for it?

Maybe you like the idea of writing, but you’re having trouble doing the work. Maybe you feel, or have heard, that writing is work, and it should feel like work, and you’re not liking that feeling.

Maybe it’s making you doubt whether you are a writer at all, or should be one, or should give it all up and try out for that competitive TV-watching team you’ve heard about.

No, you shouldn’t. Because you, and all those more-or-less well-meaning people on the internet, are looking at writing the wrong way. (more…)

Have you ever had a case of BITS? That’s “Big Important Thing Syndrome.”

That’s when we attach a lot of importance to something, which then brings with it all manner of strange and destructive critters, from plain fear to insidious perfectionism and delusions of grandeur. Which completely destroys our creative ability.

The solution? Do something that moves you forward that is completely NOT important. (more…)

TLDR: Lucy, a super-sexed girl-next-door, goes on the ultimate power fantasy, as justified by a 13-year-old boy’s rule-of-cool in a movie that fails due to motivational mismatch.

I don’t usually do this, but I’ll review a movie that didn’t work to show why. Also, because otherwise I’d have lost an hour of my life (I skimmed a lot through all the obvious parts).

Synopsis: Lucy is an exchange student in Taiwan, where she is tricked into delivering a case of drugs to a big drug lord. There, she is abused and cut open to become a drug mule with a bag of drugs hidden inside her abdomen.

So far, the movie is a standard thriller: Lucy is forced into a bad situation, the situation gets worse, and everything she does to stay alive and escape is completely inadequate. She’s running while tied to a wall (literally). If you can forgive the cross-cut hunting and lecture scenes, it’s actually a fairly standard setup with some nice cinematography.

But then things change. (more…)