Your 2018 Writing Accomplishments
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I was planning on doing our annual writing goals post for this week, but I think I want to push that off to next week and instead allow us all a minute to acknowledge the great things we did in 2018.
If you set a 2018 literary resolution, did you hit it, or at least make good progress toward it?
(Maybe you announced it in the comments of 2018’s goals post?)
Did you grow and improve as a writer? As a reader?
What was your greatest literary achievement in 2018? The thing you’re most proud of as a writer and/or a reader? read more
Best of 2018
Christmas is in only three days, New Year’s Eve is in only nine days, 2019 is staring us in the face, and many of us are out on the road, or on the tracks, or on the water, or in the sky, or, just as likely, stranded somewhere due to weather.
And we need reading material! To get us through these dull and lonely hours of lines and waiting.
I figured I could either write a novella-length post for you this week on a particular topic or offer variety in bite-size chunks.
We published about fifty posts in this space this year, and if you’ve read all of them, you’re my hero. But between general busyness, life hiccups, and the fact that not every blog post topic will grab your interest, I suspect few of you have done so. Hell, I doubt I’ve read them all!
So I thought I’d pick some highlights from our blog this year and offer them up this week as extra reading material for your travels. I’ve chosen ten of my favorites. Some I picked because I like the content or have some fond memory of writing it; others I chose not so much because of the post but because of the wonderful discussions you guys sparked in response to it.
I’m going to start with a couple of posts that might come particularly in handy this week:
The Best Part of Self-Publishing Your Book
In last week’s post, “The Hardest Part of Self-Publishing Your Book,” a few WriteByNighters took the time to discuss with us the pitfalls they had to jump across during the process of self-publishing their books.
This week, those same WriteByNighters have given even *more* of their time to tell us about the most rewarding parts of self-publishing.
The Hardest Part of Self-Publishing Your Book
Since announcing our new publication assistance services, we’ve received more than the usual amount of questions about self-publishing, particularly: What is the hardest part of self-publishing your book and are there any easy parts?
We figured who better to pose these questions to than WriteByNight clients with real-world experience. Four helpful writers responded: Dana Frank, Assaf Raz, Dan Hays, and Marcia Drut-Davis.
We’ll tackle the “easy” part next week, but for this week we’re going to start with the hard stuff. read more
Here Comes 2019! And Why Do You Write?
2019 — and its attendant resolutions — is less than a month away.
That means you have four solid weeks to come up with your new writing goals.
If you partake of such things! Not all of us do. I go back and forth. Some years I set a vague goal such as “Get better!” or “Write more!” Some years, no goal at all. For 2018, according to this post where I, and some of you, shared our 2018 writing goals, I wanted to “complete a draft of the book I began writing in May.”
lol. read more
Congrats to WriteByNighters, Part 2!
While you’re heading back this weekend from your Thanksgiving travels, why not read up on some more recent success stories from your fellow WriteByNighters.
As you’ll recall, a few weeks ago we posted about some upcoming books from our talented clients, and asked if there were any others we should know about.
There are! And here are a few of them:
Caroline Bock‘s debut story collection, Carry Her Home, was selected by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House for its 2018 Fiction Award, which includes a cash prize and publication. The book was released in mid-October, with a book launch event at D.C.’s venerable bookstore Politics & Prose. (Which would be a great place to buy the book.) read more
Franzen Folderol
The other day LitHub published a piece titled “Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules for Novelists,” borrowed from Jonathan Franzen’s new essay collection.
It caused some hubbub.
Literary Twitter went nuts. Writers and readers piled on Franzen, calling his list pretentious, narrow-minded, and/or just plain ridiculous. Chuck Wendig, to the delight of many, went on a long rant.
Others argued that the piece is taken out of context and say that Franzen’s publicists were just trying to promote the book. Some even claimed the list is meant to be satire. (It may be. I’ve never read Franzen, so I’m not familiar enough to comment.)
Anyway, agree with the list (or parts of it) or not, there are two of them I want to dig into, especially here in mid-November, halfway through NaNoWriMo. read more
Recommended Reading
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