Nathan Bransford - The Forums

I just wrote a blog post about why I don't tell anyone what my WIP is about, and I'm curious as to whether other people keep their ideas to themselves or have no problems sharing their plotlines as they unfold. What's your take? If this has been discussed previously, can someone point me in the righ...

Quitting for the day.

Only after skipping a week and then spending 14 odd hours redesigning my site, did I write about aspiring writers and The Respect of One's Peers . Everyone reacts differently on hearing that you’re a writer, but more often than not, there is a slight crossing of the eyes and a furrowing of the brow ...

A quick look at my outlining process: http://www.markfeenstra.com/blog/2010/07/22/outlining/

I've been in Vancouver for the last 7 years and am originally from Hamilton, Ontario. I personally don't feel that being a Canadian really shapes my identity as a writer. It seems like the vast majority of Canadian authors deal explicitly in Canadian content when first starting out, and I've always ...

Margo wrote:There are a few questions one could ask about their stats. What's the saying? Lies, damn lies, and statistics. It's all about what you leave out and how you phrase what you put in.

Agreed. It's not like Amazon hasn't had issues with contentious e-book statistics in the past.

This is a little harsh, but I suppose it's your prerogative to not buy books with acknowledgement pages. It seems akin to being irritated by author bios because they give away too much of the mystery.

Haven't been on the forums lately, but I wrote a short piece covering methods for backing up artistic works (writing or photos) stored on your computer. How prepared are you for a complete hard drive failure?

How Redundant Are You?

A big benefit of the iPad is that it keeps you from accidentally coming across indecent smut by telling you what you can and cannot view on it: Apple Bans Cartoon Boobs in Joyce’s Ulysses Robert Berry, the illustrator of “Ulysses Seen,” said that an image of a woman with exposed breasts was one of t...

What's the deal with the pen and paper crowd always trying to tell us typists how much better their way is? The Longhand Rant Writing longhand does not make you a better writer. You may feel as though you can think things through more thoroughly, or that the feeling of scribbling your crayon across ...

Since I'm currently unemployed, I realized that my $20 hosting fee was a little bit much to carry for the next while, so I took a risk and signed with Dreamhost for a 2 year contract because of a deal offered to Lifehacker.com readers that brings the per-month cost down to $2.69. (Get the promo code...

I'm having the worst time of this right now, but I'm still in first draft mode so I'm ignoring it until the rewrites. I just picked up the book I have on the table and flipped to a random page. 30-40% of the sentences begin with the character's name, or 'he'. I think it's like the 'said' tag in dial...

Sarcasm.

For what it's worth, I've owned my domain for several years now and never bothered setting up an email account. I'll be using my gmail address for all my querying. I lied. I just set up my email with Google apps for my domain, and will now be using mark@mydomain.com for submissions. I'm transitioni...

It's fun to play the early adopter game if you have the cash, but once the technology is out it's often best to just buy what you want to buy. Look at the apple product cycles as an example. The average time between new iPhone models is 178 days. iPod Classic, 262 days. iPod Nano, 296 days. MacBook,...