Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Polymath, I'll choose to ignore the part of that that implies any author who supports my argument is either lying, self-deluded, or not actually successful. I think an area where our dissent really lies is that your method works for you, and my method works for me. The same method does not work for ...

I'm still with Hillsy: That way lies madness, or at least paralysis. Make it good, sure; make sure none of it actively sucks. If it's not good enough, make it better. But analyzing and agonizing over Every. Single. Word. isn't going to make a perfect book (not that there is such a thing, anyway); it...

Gotta agree with Hillsy here. If you go looking for something, odds are you're going to find it whether it's there or not -- and if you go looking for every nit you can possibly pick in a piece of writing, you'll end up in a Zeno's Paradox of revisions, never getting to the end. What's engaging writ...

Generally speaking, no. Getting a full request is awesome!, but it doesn't actually promise anything other than that they'll look at it. So, just as with queries, there's no need to notify agents A-C that D & E are looking at it, too; it's assumed that you're getting your MS in front of as many ...

The only decent beta readers I've ever found, I met at conventions. It's hard to find people who (a) really will do the work, (b) have the skill & insight to see what the story could be through what it currently is, and (c) like the thing you're actually trying to achieve. (And yes, c is vitally...

Revitalizing an old thread because I'm struggling with this very thing lately. I do a lot of research on an agent before I query them, so you'd think personalization would be easy. Unfortunately, (a) I suck at it, and (b) my reason for picking a particular agent usually boils down to some variant of...

I actually have been writing -- working on finishing the NaNo project. It's coming along surprisingly well.

Unfortunately, I've discovered that I can write, or I can do journal posts & forum comments and such. Not both.

@John - Granted, I don't have much patience either with the acronym first - name second (and usually horribly contorted to fit the acronym) approach. However, there's no denying the military loves their acronyms, especially TLAs. It'd add a nice dash of realism to Preacher's fictional unit if they h...

STU sounds good to me. If you wanted to play with the acronym, you could make it the Special Threats Field Unit. Or the unit members could have a running in-joke of adding various words starting with F to the unit's name. It sounds like the sort of joke the military types of my acquaintance would ge...

I wouldn't say I'm good at it, but oddly enough I find a one-sentence pitch a lot easier than a one-page query. Give me a couple of paragraphs to work with, and I get bogged down trying to figure out how much of the backstory I have to include for things to make sense, or which of the really importa...

In the finished novel, I've got one POV character, four main or major secondary characters (the line between those gets pretty blurry), and... eight? no, ten, I think, minor characters who get names. There are some other warm bodies wandering about. Oh, and some names that are mentioned in briefing ...

Two was all that I could get (Believe me, I tried. Everyone's too busy, not just writers). You're preaching to the choir here. I hear ya on that! I'm down to one semi-reliable reader myself. Between people who'll actually do the reading, and people who can and will give useful feedback, it's an awf...

So, to the gist. The one who didn't get it got it on a 'cold read.' I told him nothing so that I could get a pure reaction from him. The other knew it was a bit of a satire because I told him. As I go through what is hopefully the last edit before I start shopping it around, I ask you this from you...

(I mean, I have an illustrated guide for how to kill a sentry silently that I found online How cool! (Er, for strictly fictional purposes, of course. ;) ) Do you happen to have the link handy? JustSarah - If it's research that's holding you up, LiveJournal & similar social-networking sites ofte...

A belated follow-up: I ran "He tutted and the cave agreed a dozen times" past my housemate without context, and she had no trouble understanding that the cave was echoing. She also thought it was a very good bit of phrasing.