An interview and other writerly links of interest

First of all, I have been interviewed by Brianna Lee McKenzie at The Cozy Corner Reading Room, so come on over and say hello.

WNR Media interviews Nathalie Hamidi about her website Find, Read, Love which helps readers to find (indie) books in a genre they will enjoy. There is also a Find, Read, Love Facebook page with several genre pages. I interviewed Nathalie about her own books two months ago.

Our friends at Sandal Press are still having their second anniversary sale, which means that all Sandal Press books are available for 99 cents. Hurry up to grab your copies, because the sale ends August 8.

Dean Wesley Smith has started a series on his blog called Writing in Public, in which he basically logs his day as a writer as well as his writing process and wordcount every single day. It’s very interested and also highly motivational, particularly if you want to write more. Moreover, Dean Wesley Smith has also set himself the challenge to produce a complete magazine and fill it with new fiction every single month.

Now filling a whole magazine with content every single month sounds like a daunting task and it is. However, there is a precedent for this sort of thing, for during the pulp era there were whole pulp magazines filled only by one or two writers writing under a multitude of pen names. The husband and wife duo of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore kept an entire line of pulp mags alive that way. And even earlier, in the 18th century, there was a gentleman in Leipzig who published a monthly magazine of “true” ghost stories as well as a couple of other magazines and not wrote the entire content of his magazines himself, but also handled printing, typesetting, commissioning cover illustrations, etc… I have blogged before about how the rise of e-publishing is not so much the birth of a new publishing paradigm, but instead a return to a very old one.

The New York Times has a lovely profile of the King family, which boasts five writers (father, mother, two sons and a daughter-in-law), all of whom have books coming out this year. The most interesting thing about this article for me was how the three King children (the oldest daughter is not a writer, but a priest) grew up in an environment where their writing was not just encouraged, but where they also were exposed to a variety of books from an early age.

While on the subject of Stephen King, The Atlantic has an insightful interview with him about the importance of first lines.

Historical romance author Mary Balogh blogs about the difficulties of creating a believable regency romance heroine, who remains true to the period, while still appealing to the sensibilities of modern readers. I think every writer of historical fiction and historical has dealt with this issue at some point.

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