Nathan Bransford - The Forums

I don't like the fact that it's a Bryan who has HIV. I think we should change his name to Tom, or maybe Bill. Connor is good. I've never liked a Connor.

steve wrote:It was a dark and stormy night.

I'm calling you Bulwer from now on.

Killing trees and old ladies is perfectly acceptable when writing. The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can't get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: hono...

Well, you know, Tolkien already had a deal for the entire Lord of the Rings series. Actually, he had a deal for the story of LotR, and it was simply broken up for publishing reasons. But he had that opportunity because of The Hobbit's success. Which was a standalone. Just sayin'. :)

Okay, yeah, I'm a Sentence Junkie. I admit it. Though that doesn't translate into a slow first draft, necessarily. I'm confident in my ability to find the right words, the right flow, and simply go with that in the first draft. But I love to tinker.

kayemevans wrote:

Bryan Russell/Ink wrote:I want Wolverine's mutant healing powers and longevity. Goodbye, chronic injuries! Hello, footballing career with Manchester United! Big steel claws would be kind of cool, too. Plus I'd save a lot in cutlery costs.

Hey! I'm an M.U. fan too!!

K

I knew I liked you for some good reason. :)

If you have an ISBN on it, it's been published. An agent needs to know this. Self-publishing it has probably burned a lot of bridges. But not all. Now you need to prove it can sell, and that means sales numbers. Selling one thousand copies out of one thousand printed is a good start. Five thousand w...

Margo wrote:

Bryan Russell/Ink wrote:The Practical Artist. Isn't that a good title? I'm a sucker for good titles.

That is a good title.

P.S. Are you using that soul? I'll cut you a good deal.

Much like Homer Simpson, I gave mine to my wife long ago. I doubt she'll sell. She has all sorts of plans for it, I hear tell.

I'm a middle-brained sort of person, so I'll say both. I write first and foremost for me, art as exploration. But I have practical ambitions, and have no compunctions about considering craft in terms of audience, marketing, sales, etc. The Practical Artist. Isn't that a good title? I'm a sucker for ...

Yes, a novel is a story. Whether the teacher has a technical reason for not wanting a novel referred to as a story in papers is something else, I'm guessing. I can see that being said, for reasons of clarity, though mostly I think it's needlessly limiting. But certainly, in a generic sense, a novel ...

A man planned a brick barbeque down to the last brick. When he'd finished building it, he had a brick left over. He shrugged and threw the brick over a fence. A man smoking a cigar and an old woman with a lap dog boarded a bus. They sat in the only empty seats next to each other. The woman complain...

Moby Dick is up there. Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen (a mix of first person voices). Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald (sort of a first person inside a first person). Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, by Javier Marias.

So many, so many...

That's just it -- YOU want new and different things. You shouldn't dismiss the quite large group of people out here who don't want new things when it comes to this sort of fantasy. I don't want to read about an elf with a twist. I want to read about elves who are elves. People always go on about th...

steve wrote:And there's this test, which rocks.

Actually, it's sort of funny - I once wrote a series of tongue-in-cheek answers to that Rinkworks test, which they published a few years back. Had fun doing that. I'll see if I can dig it up.

Good discussion. I just thought I should add to what I said previously by saying that I think a number of agents and editors would still be open to such stories, but it would be a little more difficult. First, agents will have preconceptions, say, about something that is directly using all Tolkien's...