For two and change weeks, I didn’t write anything, and I didn’t edit anything. I wasn’t on vacation, I wasn’t too busy. I just stopped, because I was too shocked and too depressed to keep doing it. I want to talk about what happened and a very important realization I came to about why, and how I moved past it. (Somewhat) How hopelessness feels... I have submitted hundreds of short stories to magazines and done hundreds of submissions to agents for books. I have pitched in person 36 times. In...

People don’t tend to fail because they can’t read; they fail because they pick the wrong steps. Sometimes someone will set out to become a “reader,” whatever that means in their head, and they will pick something way too complex or hard, and they burn out and lose interest. Other people pick things that are too short, or just not interesting to them. Maybe it is too easy and they get bored and quit. These give the first few ways you move through your reading journey to find what to do after...

Except it’s a pretty stupid question. I was recently privileged to attend a lecture by the world-renowned science fiction author Elizabeth Bear . I more or less transcribed the entire meeting, which was a talk about how to write, and specifically how to write introductions. When a person this well regarded speaks, you tend to listen. One thing she said was, something like, “There is no more harmful assumption than being a garden writer vs. an architectural writer.” Some things are beautiful...