Showing posts with label driving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label driving. Show all posts
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Closing tabs
Swimming the Hellespont! (FT site registration required; thanks to Ian C.-B. for the link.) I must do this one day....
A lovely piece by novelist Alan Warner at the Observer about what it meant to him, as a boy in the Western Highlands, to get his driver's license. (I am a person without a driver's license, and really I enjoy a life without driving, but triathlon in the end is going to make me have to learn to drive and get comfortable renting a car and driving self and bike out of the city to get to good training areas and/or races; public transportation is not so convenient in this regard, alas.)
I've been thinking quite a bit this past week about the whys and wherefores of book promotion; it is not my metier, but it must be done, and various friends and colleagues have offered thoughtful suggestions as I ponder the impending publication of Invisible Things. Several former students have been especially generous with their time and attention, and Brent contributes a link to Gary Butler's interesting 2007 profile of science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer:
A lovely piece by novelist Alan Warner at the Observer about what it meant to him, as a boy in the Western Highlands, to get his driver's license. (I am a person without a driver's license, and really I enjoy a life without driving, but triathlon in the end is going to make me have to learn to drive and get comfortable renting a car and driving self and bike out of the city to get to good training areas and/or races; public transportation is not so convenient in this regard, alas.)
I've been thinking quite a bit this past week about the whys and wherefores of book promotion; it is not my metier, but it must be done, and various friends and colleagues have offered thoughtful suggestions as I ponder the impending publication of Invisible Things. Several former students have been especially generous with their time and attention, and Brent contributes a link to Gary Butler's interesting 2007 profile of science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer:
He works seven days a week, and the definition of “work” covers many tasks, including writing/editing, developing personal marketing strategies, and graciously participating in too-long media interviews. Each novel takes a year of his life: three to four months of research (mostly reading, predominantly popular science, philosophy, and history – his favourite part of the process); two to three months for the first draft, writing a fixed target of 2,000 words per day (“it’s the only part I don’t enjoy – like a sculptor making his own clay”); three to four months of revisions, yielding anywhere from four to eight drafts before the book is “abandoned, never finished”; and finally, two months of vigorous promotion.Slightly to my own amazement, I will be signing ARCs at BEA on Wednesday, May 26 from 3:30-4 at Table 19 (the HarperCollins Children's Books booth is #3340), so if you are there, please do stop by and pick up a copy and say hello.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
