Lynn Abbey Quotes
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Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
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For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
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If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.
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It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.
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It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.
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When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
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Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.
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It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.
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I'm always trolling for trivia.
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I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.
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One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.
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Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.
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Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.
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I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
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I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.
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My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
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I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
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I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
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The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.
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When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.
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I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.
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A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
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Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
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There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.