BeeCycling

Well it’s come to this, National Novel Writing Month has been enshittified . The whole organisation had been a bit dodgy for a few years, but they’ve finally fully lost the plot with a bizarre defence of the use of A.I. tools, claiming that to decry the use of A.I. in writing is “classist and ableist.” Despite the very real issue of large language models being trained on the work of authors who never gave consent for that. Despite the threat generative A.I. poses to writers, especially freelancers. In what I’m sure is an entirely unrelated matter , they currently have a sponsorship deal with a company, ProWritingAid, that sells A.I. tools to writers. Various writers have stepped down from the board of the non-profit and lots of writers are deleting their NaNoWriMo accounts from the website. There are plenty of articles if you want to get into the weeds about it.  NaNoWriMo is in disarray -The Verge NaNoWriMo Shits the Bed on Artificial Intelligence - Chuck Wendig NaNoWriMo gets AI ...

The Revise and Resubmit Rejection (Repost from my old blog.) Writers are all too familiar with rejection. But there’s a more unusual type of rejection I don’t see much about online – the revise and resubmit rejection. What it is A rejection – but, it’s not the “ and the horse you rode in on ” type of rejection. Sometimes instead of just being told “No” by a publisher, the author gets a “no, but…” A revise and resubmit rejection says the publisher doesn’t want it as it is, but if the author is prepared to get the red pen back out and make some specified changes, they will be prepared to consider it again. What it’s not It is not a guarantee that they will take it if you make those changes, only that they will consider it again. It’s not a contract. It places no obligations on either party.

Is your book an albatross? (Republish of a post from my old blog.) What is an albatross book? It’s a book you’ve been working on for a very long time but essentially is dead weight. It’s dragging you down, like the albatross hung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner. I lugged around two albatross books for years without even writing them. Only after I got rid of them could I start to actually write. It’s usually the first novel. Or your Great Novel. Your magnum opus that will shake the literary world to its core – if you ever get around to writing it/submitting it/selling it. If you have actually written it and started submitting it, it’s getting rejected, but you keep on editing it and keep on trying because my god twenty years of blood, sweat and tears has gone into this thing!

I'm going to post a few favourites of mine from my old Wordpress blog over the next few weeks, usually with some tweaking. Then come 2023 it should be basically all new stuff - aside from one that's kind of seasonal and needs to be posted around the start of February. 10 Reasons you haven’t written your book yet (And why they are stupid.) (I was guilty of several of these in the past.) 1. I haven’t quite finished the research/outline yet. Why it’s stupid: If your first save of the outline or some research notes for this project was onto a floppy disk, you just may be procrastinating.