What is a stranger?

At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.#TheGiftofFear #RealLife
— Anne Zanoni (@ninja_CE) November 6, 2012

Helping you when depressed...

Really GOOD post about how to help yourself cope with depression:  21 Tips to Keep Your Shit Together When You’re Depressed.

And how to cope with people's attempts to help you.

I highly recommend it.  I found it a great post.

Three links...

We have always fought; challenging the women, cattle, and slaves narrative from SFWA.

Wes Chu's debut novel, The Lives of Tao, got reviewed at HuffPo.  I really enjoyed Tao myself -- lovely snark! -- and I'm glad that the sequel is coming out soon, btw.  8)

New Writers, eBook Publishers, and the Power to Negotiate from Whatever.


Food for thought.  How can you change the world?  Don't think you can?

Why not?

You might surprise yourself... far more than you can imagine.  Let yourself try.

(Shhh!) Juggling colored pens here.

Tight deadline in.  I realize that I blog over at my fan blog far more than here, but in case you're wondering where I am, I'm inside a deadline.

I left a bunch of Tweets scheduled for the next few days, mostly but not all for my SH-fan mode... but I will be around in email for work and any crises.

I'll check DMs too, I imagine.  Be back Tweeting and such in four weeks.

ETA:  I may schedule blog drafts to finally post here.  Depends on how things are going with work by this weekend.  8)

Much valuable advice for authors.

"Why I am Going Hybrid" by Bradley P. Beaulieu.

Slipping into fandom and your part in the all-volunteer group known as fandom (which runs cons...  How to change a Worldcon.

The advantages of having an agent.

Debut author lessons: Hate mail by Mary Robinette Kowal.  And do go check out the others (Debut author lessons) as I happened to see this at Lesson 14 of 14.

The Care and Feeding of an Author.

So You Want to Be a Writer by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

And because by the time you finish a book, and finish the revisions, you will reach the copy-edits... Edit Your Shit.  Part One of a series by the ineffable Chuck Wendig.

A Christie quote and some thoughts.

"Politicians don't have time to look at the world they're living in.  They see the country they're living in and they see it as one vast electoral platform.  That's quite enough to put on their plates for the time being.  They do things that they honestly believe will make things better, and then they're surprised when they don't make things better because they're not the things that people want to have.  And one can't help coming to the conclusion that politicians have a feeling that they have a kind of divine right to tell lies in a good cause."

From Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie.

Myself, I can't help wondering if Agatha herself thought this.  I wish I could ask her.  My favorite bit has the white background, the penultimate line.

It's a very talky book.  Afraid that I sat it down several times to get a breath from a certain level of overkill -- alas, not what you'd think in one of her mysteries!

Completely not related to that, I figured out some things in it and that made me happy.  I used to think she was just too good at puzzles.  She is; but I always read too fast because I want to know far more than I want to figure out whodunnit.

Ellery Queen taught me that if I just stop a bit and think, instead of rushing along, that I can figure things out.

So I've been able to tag the murderer and/or perp in a few Christies lately, and that's pleased me.  8)

Next stage on NSB and Sky/Start.

This all comes after the recent news for Night Shade Books and their authors.  There's lots of pertinent info for any writer, from the terms as discussed by agent Joshua Bilmes to the contract gone over by Michael Stackpole.

A Better Deal for Night Shade Books' Authors.

The SFWA also weighs in with a brief statement.

Tobias Buckell's roundup post has been added to, considerably.  If you haven't read it, I really recommend you do so.  If you read nothing else, read his post, because it gets the highlights of a LOT of this discussion.

He added author Kameron Hurley's post Deal/No Deal and posts [such as the initial post, The Embarrassment of the Night Shade/Skyhorse deal] by agent Andrew Zack.

I highly recommend Kameron's and Andrew's posts.  He's done several.


A Tweet from Electric Velocipede too.