Successful people are unanimous: if you want to succeed, especially as an entrepreneur or culture-industry something-or-other, don’t have a back-up plan.

“Because you will NEVER succeed when you have a back up plan.

Plan B’s are for losers. Winners have only a Plan A and work their butts off to make their Plan A work.

Do you want to be a winner or a loser?” Read more »

If wisdom means that from which we can learn, there is much wisdom in the nonfiction writings of Mike Resnick.

“Gardner Dozois, who was editing Asimov’s at the time, told me that he got about a thousand slush stories a month. How many did he buy? Three a year” (2010).

But Asimov’s publishes, what, five stories an issue? That’s 50 to 60 a year. Of which 3, Dozois tells us, are “slush stories.” That means the other 95% aren’t “slush stories.” So what are they?

A few clues: Read more »

“When I finished the first draft, in November ’97, Wired suddenly folded their book division.  I got to keep most of the advance.  But now it was hard to find a publisher for this odd orphan book.  Finally David Hartwell of Tor picked it up early in 1998 and I even got another (smaller) advance.”  (Rudy Rucker, in Broderick, D. (2000). Transrealist fiction: Writing in the slipstream of science. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. P. 169)

Wow, that sounds really hard.  I wish Rucker had shared more about how incredibly super-arduous it was to get a second publisher for his book during that terribly long period from Nov 1997 to early 1998.  This saga reminds me of Dr. Zhivago, really.  And then he had to stoop all the way to have a book published by well-known bottom-of-the-barrel Tor.  Truly, it’s a wonder any human being is capable of bearing up under these tremendous strains.

From a literary agent’s webpage:

Manuscript Wish List:

• Adult and YA fantasy and science fiction except dystopian. In SFF, prefer upmarket writing and settings/characters that think outside SFF tropes with earthy female-based characters. If submitting urban fantasy, please no demons, vampires, angels, or werewolves.
• Literary fiction, especially magical realism that highlights particular culture or surreal intellectual humor, please read this post on what is magical realism before querying.
• Historical, if the voice is strong. Please no WWII narratives.
• Genre romance
• Cozy mystery

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