Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie
This is a bit late.
A few weeks ago, everyone was talking about Word Lens, an iPhone app that translates on the fly between written Spanish and English (on signs, labels etc.) through the iPhone video camera. I was really happy to see it because back in the summer, I wrote a story that uses this augmented-reality concept in a similar way. This kind of real-world development makes the technical aspects of the story seem more plausible.
My story, “Tying Knots,” has been sold to Clarkesworld. It should be out in their next issue.
A pretty great way to end the year, I’d say.
My story, “State Change,” has been accepted by PodCastle, the fantasy fiction podcast.
Writers get rejected, a lot. Learning to deal with them is critical.
Tobia Buckell once wrote about the difference between goals and things you’d like to happen to you, and it stuck with me. Goals are things that you can control. Things you’d like to happen to you are not.
I used to get the two categories confused, and that made dealing with rejections harder. “Selling a story by the end of the year” is not a goal, it’s something you’d like to happen to you. But if you set a goal to “get ten submissions out by the end of the month,” then rejections will allow you to get more submissions out, thus accomplishing your goal faster.
I set a goal this year to get out more submissions than I’ve ever done, and I’ve accomplished that. I also set a goal to write more than I’ve ever done, and I’ve accomplished that. Along the way, I also collected more rejections than ever before — but I’m happy, because they are tangible signs that I worked towards my goal.
Incidentally, I also had more acceptances this year than ever before — definitely something I’m very happy to have happened to me. But the rejections, they made the acceptances possible.
No idea where he came from.
It seems that a popular way to “win” an argument is to belittle your opponent by claiming that the person has lived a “sheltered life.” Because the other person has not lived as authentic and gritty a life as you, the theory goes, he cannot possibly understand all the experience/passion/feeling/moral force behind your position, which is drawn from the quintessence of life itself. Indeed, he has not even earned the right to debate you.
I do not think there is much to recommend this strategy — though I’ve often been tempted to yield to it myself. Each of us has lived an authentic life in our own way, and we have all been deprived of other experiences. We are all sheltered.