On March 31, 2010, 21-year-old Veronica Roth wrote a blog post titled “You + $$$ = ?”  Two weeks later, Roth sold her first book, a dystopian YA novel about a society segregated by moral virtues and a girl who doesn’t fit in.  “I was in Psych learning about exposure therapy,” she recalls. She started writing about those people instead of doing her college homework, and within 40 days she had a completed draft.  Divergent sold quickly—after four days, to the first editor who finished reading it.  Divergent was published in May 2011 and spent eleven consecutive weeks on the New York Times’ children’s best-seller list; the sequel, Insurgent, debuted at No. 1 a year later. The series has remained there ever since.  Since no popular YA series is without a movie franchise, Summit Entertainment—the studio behind Twilight—will release Divergent early next year, and its cast (Kate Winslet, Next Big Thing Shailene Woodley) suggests similar expectations for the film version. Meanwhile, the contents of the trilogy’s upcoming final book, Allegiant (coming out October 22), are being guarded like Katniss Everdeen in the first half of Mockingjay.

http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/divergent-author-veronica-roth-builds-empire.html

ANDRE: “You see, I think that people today are so deeply asleep that unless, you know, you’re putting on those sort of superficial plays that just help your audience to sleep more comfortably, it’s very hard to know what to do in the theater. ‘Cause, you see, I think that if you put on serious contemporary plays by writers like yourself, you may only be helping to deaden the audience in a different way.

WALLY: What do you mean? Read more »

Pritchard’s Law says, in one (narrow) application, there will be an inverse relationship between the amount of plot per page in a novel and the quality of its prose.  The more plot, the worse prose.

Below are passages from various novels quoted by James Wood in The New Yorker.  He specifically singled out these passages as being well-written.  What do they have in common?   Read more »

Four years ago, he decided to give writing a shot. He and his wife were living in a 750-square foot house in Boone, N.C. He was unemployed; his wife was working as a psychologist. He had an idea for a story about a young spaceship pilot who travels across the galaxy in search of her missing father. He sold the novel, “Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue,” to a small Indiana publisher for less than a thousand dollars. Sales were meager. Read more »

Big Rock is an attribute of 140 acres two hours drive from Sydney. This has been set up next to Edward Szewczyk, an Australian designer Polska comply. That is, underestimated complicated complicated, knives home is the goal of any owner and their acquaintances rocking the city. Read more »

from Down Here in the Dream Quarter, Doubleday, New York, 1976

pp. xvi-xxi

My first piece, written in 12/65

My second written three months later

My third SF piece, written in September

My fourth was written in 11/66.  Campbell told my agent Read more »