These are some of my favorite quotations on writing. If you have any to add, feel free! :)

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” — Marcus T. Cicero

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.” — Oscar Wilde

“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.” — Oscar Wilde

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” — Oscar Wilde

“Grammar, which can govern even Kings.” — Moliere

“I always write a good first line, but I have trouble writing the others.” — Moliere

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Moliere

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” — William Faulker

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” — Robert Frost

“The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but thee who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” — John Milton

“Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.” — John Osborne

“I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers’ circles and at summer schools, and I’m continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing.” — Sarah Harrison

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” — Thomas Edison

“The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.” — Mark Twain

“You must keep sending your work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success — but only if you persist.” — Isaac Asimov

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov

“Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.” — John Farrar

“The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.” — William Hazlitt

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.” — Oscar Wilde

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” — Oscar Wilde

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” — Cyril Connolly

“Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.” — Charles Caleb Colton

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” — Edwin Schlossberg

“Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.” — Jesse Stuart

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.” — John Irving

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.” — Leonard Bernstein

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler

“Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.” — John Ruskin

“About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” — Josh Billings

As you know, Devil Falls is out. (Everyone, go buy a copy! ;) ) Samhain doesn't register copyright for the works it publishes, and so it was up to me to do it. And I did just now. It's very easy to do by going to copyright.gov and it only cost $35. (BTW — there's nothing fishy about Samhain not registering copyright for its authors. Samhain is a small press, and it doesn't have the kind of resources to do it for all the titles it publishes.)

Some may ask why I bothered. Or why I hadn't waited to see if it was worth it based on the sales data before I registered.

I did it for the same reason I got my Samhain contract reviewed by a literary attorney. This is business, and I wanted to do it right. There's a big difference between the kind of protection you can get by registering within three months of publication v. later (or not at all):

Registration within three months allows you to become eligible to receive statutory damages and legal costs and attorneys' fees from a copyright infringer.

…lots of other benefits that come with registration, like providing a public record of your copyright claim or that copyright registration is a prerequisite to bringing a copyright infringement suit. Sure, you can register your copyright later and then sue, but you'll end up paying a lot more to expedite the process since you'll want to immediately obtain an injunction against whoever is infringing your copyright.

Will I ever need the protection? I hope not, but you never know, and I prefer to have all my bases covered.

Now for more fun stuff….NANOWRIMO!!!!!

I'm planning to write 15 ms-formatted pages a day, five days out of a week, and write about 5 to 9 pages on the other two days. I think that's very reasonable.

So NaNo, here I come!

…check out this post by Andrew Wheeler. Some of the most interesting parts include:

By the way: that's what it's called when your book isn't picked up by a particular bookseller. Your book is “a skip,” and they have “skipped” you.

…bookstores are businesses, not public conveniences. No store has the responsibility to carry every book published — although, to be honest, that's a straw-man argument, since no one is asking for that. (They're just wishing that their books, the books they like, and the books by their friends be spared the chopping block.) I market books for a living, so I can tell you an unpleasant truth: the order for any book, from any account, starts at zero. The publisher's sales rep walks in the door with tipsheets and covers, past sales figures and promotional plans, to convince that bookseller's buyer to buy that book. In many categories — SFF is still one of them — the chain buyers say “yes” the overwhelming majority of the time. But not all the time. Sometimes, that buyer is not convinced, and the order stays at zero.

I should also point out that chainstore buyers have budgets; they don't have an infinite amount of money to play with. They have to buy books for all of the stores in the chain, in their category, given the money they have available — this is called “open to buy,” and varies depending on recent sales, returns, and what else is publishing that month. Like any other budget, I'm sure buyers start with the most important things — the big books that month — and work their way down the list. If the money runs out before they hit the bottom, that's it.

Let's talk specifics. Frost's Lord Tophet was skipped because his previous book (the one Lord Tophet is the second half of), Shadowbridge, didn't sell well enough.

…

Frost points out that Shadowbridge “received glowing reviews and went back to print twice in its first six months.” But neither of those things, sadly, mean anything on their own. Lots of books are glowingly reviewed and don't sell — ask the literary writers selling 1,500 copies of their first novels — and reprinting twice in six months can just mean that the first printing was tiny. What I can say: Shadowbridge sold less than 2,500 copies, as a $14.00 trade paperback, across all reporting sales outlets (which include Borders, B&N, Amazon, and others), since the beginning of this year. Of those, almost 2000 were sold at the “Retailer” level, which includes Borders, B&N, and other brick-and-mortar stores. If those were sold evenly between B&N and Borders superstores, and nowhere else, each superstore sold a little over a copy and a half.

Pat Cadigan all but called for a boycott of Borders in her post. Even allowing for the effect of anger, and the tendency of blog posts to be overly extreme and rabble-rousing, I can't see that this would be a good idea. Even if it had a noticeable effect — and that's a big “if” — getting SFF readers to move their business away from Borders is exceptionally unlikely to get Borders to start stocking SFF in more depth. Rather the reverse, actually. If Cadigan wants Borders to cut back on SFF, she has an excellent plan. If not, not.

I'm done with revising The Last Slayer for the moment. Which means Agent thinks it's ready to be shopped around, and I'm happy with it, too. I can't thank her enough for all the suggestions and notes on how to make the story better. I really think the entire story hangs together so much more cohesively now.

Coincidentally (or otherwise) Colleen Lindsay blogged about revisions / rewrites and ego landing. I'd never heard the phrase “the ego has landed”, but it's from a blog post by Del Rey Editor-in-Chief Betsy Mitchell on revisions / rewrites. It look like there are many writers who are very resistant to revisions / rewrites, even if they're going to make the story better, because they're so convinced of their own brilliance or something.

I hope I never become one of those writers. Agent, May and Hero Material have my permission to smack me hard when my hat becomes too snug for my own good.

There have been several articles and blog posts about how the subprime crisis is going to make it near-impossible for new writers to sell, blah blah blah, and I'm sure many of you have read them already. They do look pretty gloomy, the end-of-your-dream-as-a-wannabe-pro kind. And some aspiring writers are feeling so discouraged that they don't even want to bother querying until the economy improves.

This is what I think about the entire situation:

It's never been easy to get published. I can't think of a time when someone squealed, “OMG! It's sooooo easy to get published.”

It's always been difficult to get published and build a career. What changes is the factors that make it hard to do so.

But one thing you know for sure is that people will continue to buy great books. Everyone's looking for a fabulous story, the kind that makes them lightheaded with excitement. And that's what you the writer can control. So write something that leaves agents and editors panting for more, and no matter how bad the economy is (or whatever), they'll publish it and readers will buy it.

On one of the loops I belong to there's been a discussion on one of the workshops because some people thought it was too snarky because the manuscripts were someone's baby. I don't know … but if you send something to publishing industry professionals, you should be ready to hear what they have to say even if you think their comments are mean. It's not their job to spare your tender feelings. Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to submit.

Your manuscript is NOT your baby or treasure or any such thing. It's a product you hope to sell to make a profit. (Or at least generate positive cash flow since “profit” is a figment of an accountant's imagination.) This is not to say that it doesn't hurt to get rejected or us writers don't get neurotic when we write. But this kind of attitude helps because you can maintain some distance so that an editor/agent's rejection of your manuscript does not become personal and morph into a rejection of your baby.

(BTW — I don't get this “baby” thing in the first place. Do people normally sell their children to the highest bidder?)

To invest excessive emotional attachment above and beyond what's necessary will only break your heart even more when you get rejection slips, crappy reviews, and snarky reader comments.