Louise Marley's Blog
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Jun.17.2009
In 1993, I had an experience that changed my life. I attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, with magnificent instructors like Greg Bear, Connie Willis, Geoff Ryman, Lucius Shepherd, and the wonderful Pat Murphy. I had been studying writing, and the six weeks of intensive work at...
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Jun.15.2009
I'm often asked how long a novel manuscript should be. The flip answer is "as long as it needs to be", but of course that's not all that helpful. The fine young agent Jennifer Jackson, on her blog, has given us a good, solid answer, with a bit of explanation for any newbies who need...
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Jun.12.2009
I love Amazon's Kindle, I admit it. It's so easy to use, and even late at night, I'm never out of something to read if I can get a radio signal to download a new book. But the Kindle bypasses brick-and-mortar bookstores. As Michael Powell, of the venerable and quite wonderful Powell's Books of...
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Jun.11.2009
Wouldn't we all like to know what literary agents are really thinking? Mine is always so nice to me, I sometimes suspect he's protecting me from harsh reality. The agent of a friend of mine, on the other hand, is so blunt with her that, if he were my own agent, I would probably turn up my toes...
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Jun.08.2009
For a comparatively slow writer like me, trying to make a little extra on reprints is a really good idea. I more or less stumbled on the fact that Cricket Magazine takes reprints, and so I tried them with a young adult fantasy story I had published in an anthology. After many, many months--in...
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Jun.02.2009
As a writer, I would much prefer not to have to worry about these things. I would love to be such a blockbuster author that I could expect my people to do the worrying. As that is not (yet) the case, though, I've been trying to keep my finger on publishing's pulse, so I have some idea what will...
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Jun.01.2009
The report from Book Expo shows only one increase in sales: those for electronic readers. This causes a ripple of unease among the die-hard paper book fans, of course. The New York Times ran an article just last week by someone complaining about the future of literature in an electronic age. ...
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May.31.2009
This morning I read the New York Times' report on Book Expo. Not only are book sales down across the board--adult, juvenile, religious--but even attendance at the event is down something like seventeen per cent. So, in need of a laugh, I turn to the wonderfully wry piece someone shared with me...
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May.28.2009
A young student of mine confessed to me yesterday that she belatedly took the advice I had given her. (A teacher loves to hear that.) She was searching for an ending to a short story, and it just wouldn't come. The deadline (mine) loomed, and so she finally did what I so often suggest: She...
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May.27.2009
One of the high school students I've mentored all of this academic year brought her finished project to me the other day. Her book, generously illustrated with original drawings, is now in a lovely POD (print-on-demand) edition she can share with her teachers, her project committee, and family...
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May.13.2009
Beloved son came to Mass with me on Mother's Day, the gift I had asked for. It was lovely having him there, of course. As we stood during part of the ritual, I saw him bobbing his head to some inner beat, and I knew he--a rock musician and song composer--was thinking of one of his songs, working...
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May.06.2009
There's another fascinating book out about the way our brains work. A delightful woman named Winifred Gallagher has just published Rapt--Attention and the Focused Life. Using some pretty impressive research, she makes another case to support something I learned in the excellent book Brain Rules...
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May.05.2009
This is not my first experience with seeing my work in translation, but I'm struck by how different the story seems in someone else's hands. The title is different, the cover of course is different--I can't wait to read that first page, and see how I sound in another tongue!
This is Airs Beneath...
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May.03.2009
I've read, as I'm sure we all have, a whole bunch of books that tell us how to go forward to write a bestseller. I harbor a vague sense of guilt most of the time that I'm not "doing it right", a sense supported and encouraged by other writers who have their own ideas about how to "...
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Apr.28.2009
For those who are concerned about this, I've copied the following from Publishers' Weekly. And just as an aside, my own agent has advised me to simply go with it. Clearly, there are still some details to shake out.
GBS Settlement Parties Request Delay The plaintiffs and Google have filed a motion...
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About Louise
Louise Marley is a former concert and opera singer who now writes fulltime. She is a two-time Endeavour Award winner, has had several ALA Best Books of the Year honors, and two Nebula nominations. Her bibliography includes science fiction, fantasy, and young...
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