How much of yourself is in your writing? This question can dig much deeper into who we are than just the superficial, and the more we’re aware of our influences, the more we can improve our stories.

Read More
How Much of Yourself Is in Your Writing?

In situations where we want to improve—such as writing—we focus our time on analyzing our weaknesses, and that’s necessary to identify how we can reach the next level of expertise. But at the same time, if we fail to recognize our strengths, we might suffer in several ways.

Read More
What Are Your Writing Strengths?

In my last post, we talked about struggling to write when suffering from burnout. Maintaining a connection with our passions can help us endure the problems of life, and remembering how and why we have passion for writing might help us recover from burnout.

Read More
Reconnecting with Our Passions: Storytelling

Surprisingly, many authors haven’t bothered worrying about book pirates. They figured a few copies going to readers who never would have paid for them anyway didn’t matter. Heck, some authors even thought book pirates could be good for their career. Spread the word, appeal to more readers who might buy their book next time, yadda yadda. Um,

Read More
The New Face of Book Pirates: Plagiarists

The internet exploded yesterday with Amazon’s introduction of “Kindle Worlds,” a new publishing model for writers inspired to write fan fiction (fanfic). Everyone and anyone has been commenting on this development, often with gnashing of teeth. Some see this as a win for the fanfic authors, and some see this as an exploitation and/or ripoff

Read More
Amazon’s Fan Fiction Model: Is It a Good Idea?

Publishing industry news has exploded with stories about a new genre, called New Adult. The New Adult genre is meant to bridge the supposed gap between Young Adult (teen) books and general Adult fiction books. Every news site from the New York Times to Publishers Weekly has been giving their spin on the genre ever

Read More
The “New Adult” Genre: Why Does It Exist?

Last time, we discussed the different options for publishing a story that had its genesis in fan fiction: name-change-only, reworking, and rewriting. Whether we believe there’s ever a “right” way to publish a story that began as fan fiction (fanfic), authors who completely rewrite their story should be recognized for at least making the attempt to avoid

Read More
Fan Fiction to Published Book: A Case Study

On the surface, this might seem like a clear-cut question. Unless we’ve turned the copyright over to another entity, it seems like we should be able to reuse our own work. However the issues surrounding what is sometimes termed “self-plagiarism” are more complicated than they might first appear. Many of us who blog will occasionally rerun

Read More
Can Writers Reuse Their Own Work?

When you first started writing, did you realize how much work it would take? Or were you like most of us, thinking that you’d written your share of emails, essays, or Christmas letters and that writing a whole story wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—that much harder? But at some point—maybe it’s when we struggle to make the

Read More
The Hard Work of Writing: Do You Embrace It?