Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Stephen King
Month: October 2010
The First Query
I have just emailed my first query to an agent. Now to wait. And fire off a few more.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Herman Melville cf. [T]rap streets, or deliberate cartographic errors introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms. In other words, if a competitor’s map includes your “trap street” — a geographic feature that you’ve simply invented — then you (and your lawyers) will know they nicked your data, gave it a quick redesign and tried to pass it off as their own. But this strategy of willful cartographic deception is not always limited to streets: there can be trap parks, trap ponds, trap buildings. And trap rooms. …. These and other subtle geographies — trap architectures — awaiting detection all around us.
—Geoff Manaugh (via bobulate)
I don’t really write about anything I don’t love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
Jonathan Lethem
Interesting approach to outlining.
A spreadsheet plot written out by J.K. Rowling. Her approach to spreadsheet plotting is to divide the columns by chapter number, story timeline, chapter title, main plots and subplots.
