Not really a trust issue for me; I have a whole lot of keys on this keyboard and I’m not afraid to use any of them. But there’s a different perspective from Lynn Viehl:
Tomorrow it will be one week since writers around the world began working on their National Novel Writing Month book. I always love the first week of writing a new novel, but I always hate it, too. There’s the excitement of beginning a new story, which clashes with the dread that I’ve chosen the wrong idea to write. I’ve probably had the characters in my head for quite some time, and yet I’ve never heard them before on the page (a bit of synethesia there; I hear my characters via the dialogue I write.) Unless I’m working on a series book I’m generally in a new place with a lot of unfamiliar folks doing things unknown to me, and this can be both exhilarating and exhausting.
For some of you this first week has been instructive; it’s given you a chance to engage in a work routine, figure out how much you can comfortably write per day, etc. You’ve discovered self-discipline, internal or external motivation, and how you may best do this thing. For some of you it’s been the exact opposite; you’re fighting with the words and the characters and the concept; the story is getting away from you (or hasn’t appeared at all as you imagined it), and you may even be thinking this was a very bad idea, and/or you’re considering tossing in the towel now before you end up looking/feeling/writing like a fool. Most of you will waffle between these two states or land somewhere in the middle of them for the next twenty-five days.
I recently read a diatribe by an author about how great and wonderful DRM is. And how it saved the music industry. And how they believe they “added something unique to the market, and I believe I deserve to be paid for my work.” And how ebooks are in decline. And how “a lack of DRM decimated the music industry.”
The CBC is reporting that the Writers’ Union of Canada is expected to vote on a measure to accept self-published authors as members at the end of May. From the article:
According to the AP, the Finca Vigia Foundation is working with Cuba to preserve and digitize papers left by Papa in Cuba after his passing in 1961.