Writing
Eric San Juan
November 12, 2010
There are times when the words don’t come, and what words that do come make you cringe. You sit down and work, you reach your writing goals each day, but you hate every last bit of work you produce. I’m in the midst of one of those rough patches. For the last week or so I’ve wanted to toss my work-in-progress in the trash. It’s not writer’s block — writer’s block is bullshit — it’s something else. It’s “this sucks, this story sucks, these words suck, why am I bothering with this?” I hate that feeling. I’ve mentioned a few times before that I’m wrapping up a readable draft of a dystopian science fiction novel. I’ve gone back and forth between hoping people find it…
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Eric San Juan
October 9, 2010
If you were interested in that little comics anthology I wrote last year (with the help of a slew of talented artists) but still hadn’t gotten around to getting a copy, good news. It’s now available via lulu.com. I’ve gotten my copy and can vouch for its quality. Nice, glossy cover, strong binding, and decent paper quality. I’ll be up front: happy as I was with the quality of the work ComiXpress did (and I was), I got some complaints about slow order fulfillment. Excellent quality on the product, but it’s true. A few orders were slow to be fulfilled. The Lulu version takes a slight slight (slight!) hit on paper quality, but trades it for a glossy cover, printed spine, and very fast delivery….
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Eric San Juan
October 8, 2010
… not something I can announce just yet, but I’ve been working hard on it for the last two weeks or so, it’s due in bookstores next August, I’m working with some extraordinary writers (I’m merely one small part of a team), including Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award nominees, and it will be geeky as hell. The last part is the best part of all. So yeah, all you geeks out there? Watch out for a wickedly fun announcement
Eric San Juan
September 29, 2010
Every now and then someone mistakes me for a person with a clue and asks how to approach a publisher about a book. There are no grand secrets — by now everyone knows that — just some basics on how to get started. In a series of posts last year I outlined how my first book landed on shelves, but skip all that for now, because I want to get to probably the most important part of the process aside from the writing itself: Your query letter. A query letter is simple, in theory. It’s you saying to an agent or publisher, “Hey, want to see my book?” Not so simple in practice, though. I won’t get into the details because other people have done…
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Eric San Juan
September 27, 2010
My Jersey journalist-in-arms John Saccenti put together a little 50-word fiction contest on Facebook. Had a few moments to spare and thought, why not? So, at exactly 50 words, here is my entry: THE MACHINES We forgot to unplug them. And so the Machines fell upon us while we slept, a storm of metal and gears filling the sky like so much angry cloud. With scraping and thunder and screaming and wheels, wheels, wheels, the Machines tore into us, and all were turned to meat. Fin