author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hullo. Not dead. The short story's on hold for a few days, though--dangit--so I can meet a paying deadline. So I'm going to unload a few links on you. Look sharp, here they come--

Charles Stross on the writer's lifestyle (Via By The Way)

Firstly, forget the romance of the writer's lifestyle and the aesthetic beauty of having a Vocation that calls you to create High Art and lends you total creative control. That's all guff. Any depiction of the way novelists live and work that you see in the popular media is wrong. It's romanticized clap-trap. Here's the skinny:

You are a self-employed business-person. Occasionally you may be half of a partnership — I know a few husband-and-wife teams — but in general novelists are solitary creatures. You work in a service industry where output is proportional to hours spent working per person, and where it is very difficult to subcontract work out to hirelings unless you are rich, famous, and have had thirty years of seniority in which to build up a loyal customer base. So you eat or starve on the basis of your ability to put your bum in a chair and write. BIC or die, that's the first rule.

The Tightrope Walker blog on writing what you love (via retterson)

But I've seen other writers, just as excellent, back away because -- although they're clearly packed taut with talent -- they think there's some bar there, some Berlin Wall of the mind -- basically, a big sign at the end of a nowhere road that says, "Anything you try to write will be lifeless. Boring. A canteen of sand in the desert. Don't even try."

To them I say: potato chips.

Hmm. I may have linked that latter one before. It feels familiar. ...Oh, well. Enjoy.

Also, for those of y'all subscribed to my RSS feed via LiveJournal (you would do that by adding nicolejleboeuf to your Friends list) yes, yes I know that there's something fishy about the timestamps coming off my Metroblogging posts. There's a six- or seven-hour diff between the time on the post itself to the time on the post summary that shows up on LJ. At some point, probably after Monday, I'll look into that. 'Til then, pretend it's an exciting adventure in time travel. Yay!