Writing Fiction

Blogging the writing of a new book

I've started a blog for a new book just getting under way: Write Your Nonfiction Book Online. After using blogs (including this one) to create and promote three books, it seems natural to do it for a fourth. Blogs make good workspaces for print projects, especially those requiring access to online resources. And once the book is out, the blog becomes a promotional space and a way to update and correct the text.

It's also now possible, of course, to write and publish online, so fiction writers may find some of the content of the new blog useful for that purpose also.

Hazards of being a blogging novelist

Guy Gavriel Kay has an entertaining item in today's Globe and Mail, about the bad things that can happen to successful novelists who interact online with their readers: Release the fans! Excerpt:

George R.R. Martin is the hugely successful purveyor of an ongoing, seven-volume fantasy series called A Song of Ice and Fire. Four books are done. The first three came quickly, then there was a five-year wait for the fourth. 

The first indicated publication date for the fifth instalment, fiercely awaited, was 2006. That has rather obviously been missed: Martin is still writing it. The natives are restless. 

How restless? Well, on his blog, cutely called Not a Blog, Martin fired back two weeks ago at what he called “a rising tide of venom” about how late he is. 

Seems some of his loyal and devoted readers are savagely attacking him for taking holidays, for watching football in the fall, for attending conventions, doing workshops, editing a volume of short stories, even for being “60 years old and fat” (I'm quoting here, trust me) – the implication being he might drop dead before fulfilling his obligation to do nothing else but finish the damned series.