To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.
There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.
TREE HOUSE A tree house, a free house, A secret you and me house, A high up in the leafy branches Cozy as can be house. A street house, a neat house, Be sure to wipe your feet house Is not my kind of house at all- Let's go live in a tree house.
Well, Thanksgiving we'll all gather at my house for dinner and we usually do Christmas at Beau's house. My mom is still feisty and kicking. She's 92. I saw her last night and she published a book at 90. It's a wonderful book called "You Caught Me Kissing" and it's basically love-poems that she wrote for my dad. It's more than that, it's a wonderful book.
A manuscript not submitted is a book not published.
Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.
About a year after (my stories began being published), magazine editor George Scithers, suggested to me that since I was so new at being published, I must be very close to what I had to learn to move from fooling around with writing to actually producing professional stories. There are a lot of aspiring writers out there who would like to know just that. Write that book.SFWW-I is that book. It's the book I was looking for when I first started writing fiction.
I remember going over proofs of this book - my first book - back in 2001, in a bar in Toronto called the 'Victory Cafe', and thinking sadly to myself, 'This is a very good manuscript but not a very good book.' I don't know what I meant by that, but I was pretty heartbroken and sure it was true.
In the end, the difference between a published writer and an unpublished one comes down to one thing: The unpublished writer gave up, and the published writer didn't.
It's really hard to get a book published, even a good book, but the better the book is the better chance it has of eventually catching someone's attention.
I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.
I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and trying to rewrite it.
Any book is a Good Book, and wherever they keep the Good Book safe is also the House a the Lord.
The book the Ziff folks sent me as an example of their art was 'Late Night VRML 2.0 with Java,' 700 pages + CD-ROM, published February 1997. I was personally acquainted with more movie stars than people who might conceivably have wanted to buy this book or any book like it.
I've tried to slow this down but realized that my natural reading rhythm is freakishly fast when an author friend asked me to go through the manuscript of her soon-to-be-published book for continuity errors.
You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.
My first book was published without any editorial advice. Nobody said, 'You might do this or that,' or 'Why don't we see more of this.' I merely took the book and published it.