Interview with Brendan P. Frye on Community Fridays

Welcome to Community Fridays! During this weekly event, I interview authors, editors, publishers, and pretty much anyone else who I can get my hands on from the writing and publishing community. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to suggest new participants. Check out current and past interviews here. Only have a minute? Click here for interviews at a glance.

Today's guest is Brendan P. Frye, editor for the Canadian online and print magazine Comics and Gaming monthly.

You’re a writer, as well as an editor, for the magazine Comics and Gaming Monthly. Which did you start out as? How did you transition from one to the other?

I started writing when I was in university, where I did movie and album reviews for local newspapers. First came unpaid opportunities, which I used as a chance to expand on my writing skills. From these jobs I moved to an online publication, Lucid Forge. I worked as content editor there for about 3 years, and while I was there, I ensured everyone worked together, but also that the site had the best coverage of the best music and film events for the area. The transition between the two was not as complex as you may think; once I took control I had a solid team of writers that ensured the move was easy and painless. Really it just comes down to doing what you love to do, and keep doing it until people notice you.

I’ve thought about becoming an editor myself, so that I can toy with the pawns – I mean, writers. How is the skill set that you use for writing different than the one you use for editing a publication?

Looking Forward to the New Year: Writing in 2012

I have to say, I'm really excited looking towards the next year. I know, I know, it's really just an arbitrary date change, but like many people I find it useful at some point during the year to take stock, and this is as good a time as any.

A lot of changes have happened in 2011, both writing related and otherwise. They include a move, career exploration, and a huge shift in the ways that I've managed to leverage my freelance writing. Despite all of the changes, a lot of the year (like many years before) felt like a set-up for things to come in the future. I hope 2012 will be the year the wheels actually start turning.

There's mixed opinion out there as to whether it's better to share your goals or keep them to yourself (I probably mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating). Derek Sivers of TED talk fame says not to share; a host of others, among them The Change Blog and Goalmigo, have the opposite opinion. I've found both techniques to be equally useful (or useless, as the case may be), though certainly writing them down for personal use is better than leaving them to rattle around untethered in your head.

So I've decided to describe the coming year as a seer might, putting out ideas rather than hard-and-fast goals. Mmm, yes, the crystal ball is showing me something... I can see clearly now... There is another move in the near future. Writing, lots of writing. More fiction. More blogging. More connecting with writers and helping to showcase their work. More opportunities. And something else, it's not quite certain, but I'll be doing something next year that's unlike anything I've done to date.

Okay, so maybe the crystal ball was a bit of a bust. Anyway, the point is I'm excited to be going forward, and I hope that all of you are, too!

Interview with R. S. Guthrie on Community Fridays

Welcome to Community Fridays! During this weekly event, I interview authors, editors, publishers, and pretty much anyone else who I can get my hands on from the writing and publishing community. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to suggest new participants. Check out current and past interviews here. Only have a minute? Click here for interviews at a glance.

Today's guest is R. S. Guthrie, a writer exploring different publication types and an activist promoting the use of writing to make a difference.

Your embrace of the philosophies of both self-publishing and traditional publishing struck a chord with me. Many people are vehemently for one side or the other. Can you explain why you think some books should be self-published, and others traditionally published?

This is a great question! I think traditional publishing still carries with it a (somewhat deserved) badge of prestige, whereas self-publishing carries with it a bit of a stigma. Whether we all want to admit it or not, the sea of self-published books is wide, deep, and in spots, a bit smelly. It is like everything else in life: nothing comes without cost. The problems with going the traditional route, other than potential rejection after potential rejection, I see as primarily twofold:

1. The time to publication. In this market, unless you are well-known, you might as well be an indie. The uphill marketing battle is nearly the same (and requires nearly as much work on your part). That said, getting more books out there is pretty important. If you have to wait a year and a half for your book to be released, you could be falling behind.
2. You likely lose some, if not all, rights to your work. This means your publisher can demand changes, controls price and distribution, and takes a cut. You can't just sign up for a promotion or drop the price of your book for Christmas. Not unless you obtain the permission of your publisher.

If your work is good enough for the traditional route, it may be worth it to go through the time and heartache to have it published by a known publishing house. I certainly wouldn't go through all that for a no-name publisher. Both options mean a ton of marketing work for the unestablished author. I think more and more the self-publishing route is becoming the better option, but showcasing your needle in a nearly indefinite stack of needles is a huge challenge.

On your blog, you talk about the difficulty of finding good books based purely on ratings. What do you think is a better way for readers to discover good, new authors?

How To Write a Draft... and How Many Drafts it Takes

How does one write a draft? And how many drafts does it take until a story, blog post, or article is complete? There are plenty of people out there searching for the answers to those questions.

As a freelancer, I have a lot of different projects going on at one time. Not all of them are computer-based, so I don't always sit in front of my computer for long spans of time, nor do I always have the luxury of spending my computer time focused on a single piece of work. This can be very frustrating if I'm trying to achieve a certain goal in one sitting - such as, say, "finishing a first draft." I'm sure the same is true for many people who live and work in the writing world. Whether it's kids, pets, other jobs, or something else that takes your mind away from the draft, it can be hard when you don't know when it's time to "move on to the next stage."

Now that I've been thinking more about drafts in general, and how to get my work done more quickly specifically, I think that the problem is with the carved-in-stone definition of "draft." For example, when I write an article for a site online (such as Trail's Edge Blog), I used to try and force myself through to my desired word count on the first pass. That led to me either staring at the screen angrily when I was halfway through and coming up blank, or just procrastinating until I had that perfect slot of time available. Which never happened, by the way.

Interview with Gord McLeod on Community Fridays

Welcome to Community Fridays! During this weekly event, I interview authors, editors, publishers, and pretty much anyone else who I can get my hands on from the writing and publishing community. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to suggest new participants. Check out current and past interviews here. Only have a minute? Click here for interviews at a glance.

Today's guest is Gord McLeod, tech blogger, fiction writer in the steampunk genre, and owner of the new site Fiction Improbable.

In the comments section on a post on your blog, we had a little mini-brawl over whether it was better to write the first draft quickly or slowly. Just kidding; it was all very civil. Honestly, I'm still on the fence on this one. What, in your opinion, are the benefits of taking your time on a first draft?

The big benefit that comes to mind first is that when you take your time on a first draft you have the time to plan it out well and make sure you’re not missing any vital pieces of the story. Rushing carries the risk that your draft will have giant holes. The potential problem is the same thing though—you have the time to cover ground. A lot of ground. So much ground that you risk not finishing at all, of getting caught up in an unending cycle of editing that leaves you unable to write and make progress.

Writing a Book Is Just Capturing a Moment

My feelings about getting a book published have never been stable. When I was younger, I thought it would be cool to see my name printed on the pages of a novel, but I never got much farther than that. Now, with 4.5 finished first drafts under my belt (and yes, the 0.5 one is finished because I don't intend to take it any further), I can't say that I'm feeling any more certain about the prospect of being published.

It's never been a question of confidence. I know that, with enough perseverance, I have just as much chance at getting published as anyone else. And, barring that, I've explored self-publishing and know that I could easily take that road if I found myself with a project I cared about that didn't fit into the traditional publishing framework.

No, the real problem has been uncertainty over whether my work can meet the high standards I've set for myself. I've read some excellent books in my life, books by Tamora Pierce and J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Dickens and others that have changed the way that I view the world. How can I hope to make a mark in an environment that already has so much great literature in it?

Interview with Dianna Gunn on Community Fridays

I'm thrilled to be bringing Community Fridays back to my blog!

During Community Fridays, I interview authors, editors, publishers, and pretty much anyone else who I can get my hands on from the writing and publishing community. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to suggest new participants. Check out current and past interviews here. Only have a minute? Click here for interviews at a glance.

Today's guest is Dianna Gunn, an intern at the speculative fiction emagazine Penumbra, and also a writer and blogger. Stay tuned for promotion ideas for writers and tips about getting published in e-magazines.

You're working as an intern at Penumbra eMagazine, which publishes speculative fiction. Tell us a little about the magazine's focus, and how it's different than some of the others available.

First off, Penumbra is an eMagazine. Running everything online means we have a pretty low overhead compared to other magazines in the same genre, so we can afford to sell Penumbra for less without sacrificing the authors' pay. Second off, we pay our authors the professional rate of five cents per word. There are only a handful of other magazines that pay the professional rate for stories. So when you buy from us, you know you're not just supporting Penumbra--you're supporting the authors you love.