‘XIII’ is a spy show. I think the comic book is a little too similar to ‘The Bourne Identity.’ I tried to take it away from that. I believe there was, many years ago, before the Bourne movies, a lawsuit that made it so they couldn’t be published in English.
As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them out.
There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don’t count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.
I always look for genuineness. If I feel I can connect with the audience, I will try to develop it. For example, the genesis of ‘Kannathil Muthamittal’ was an article published in a magazine.
Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.
I’m a tattoo artist, and I went to school to paint, and I started writing and getting published.
I used to think that most published writers, the ones I admired, had a muse, or a special connection to the universe, to nature, or to aliens – something inaccessible to me that caused their prose to flow onto the page, already perfect.
When I published my first novel, ‘Slammed,’ I included lyrics at the beginning of each chapter from one of my favorite bands, The Avett Brothers. The overwhelmingly positive response from readers to those lyrics really surprised me.
I grew up reading Updike. I remember being alarmed to find that he had published short stories by the time he was 22. I think ‘Pigeon Feathers’ was the first collection of stories I read. Only much later did I discover his non-fiction reviewing and art criticism.
I really do love ‘Panama.’ But I’d also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn’t even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn’t be published. I’d be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.
My first book was an adult novel, ‘Down Among the Gods,’ published by Virago, and I’ve written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published.
It’s still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day.
The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.
I have published so many books in so many years. I can’t complain about any lack of attention. But I’ve never been placed as a Southern writer, which I really am. So I was happy finally to be published by someone in the South.
Well – I started writing – probably in the early 60s and by say ’65-’66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published – certainly in the 20 years prior to that.
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.
I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter – or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
I don’t think that I had any idea that ‘Fear of Flying’ would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.
The attempts to command the climate and decide about the temperature on our planet are wrong and arrogant. I wrote a book about it which was published in English under the title ‘Blue Planet in Green Shackles.’
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called ‘Dead I Well May Be.’
Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I’m totally insane.
Nobody ever asks me why my characters don’t text each other. Besides, as soon as you put something ‘electronic’ in a book, it’s already out of date by the time it’s published: everything will have changed. Human emotion, on the other hand, will never change.
I think certainly if I’d started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn’t know anything much about the world. I hadn’t had any direct experience of how the world works.
When I was first writing, my little prayers were, ‘Please, please, please. Let something be published someday.’ Then it went to, ‘Please, please, please. Let somebody read this.’
I’ve gone through the years and I’ve written stuff for Jules that has never gotten published, but I thought I’d write her smooth R&B bedroom song.
Every famous writer was once an unknown writer. If publishers never published new writers, they wouldn’t be publishing anyone at all after a while.
In February of this year I returned to China to research my next book. The authorities know about the novels of mine that have been published in the west, including the latest one, Beijing Coma, about a student shot in Tiananmen Square, but so far have allowed me to return.
When the ‘Book of Mormon’ was first published, some of those who believed in it taught it to others and testified of it.
Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel ‘Deliverance’ was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of ‘The Great Gatsby.’
For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.
I’m a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It’s true: I have a master’s degree in creative writing, I’ve published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.
I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.
By the end of 1982, the game changed. Muller published her second Sharon McCone novel, Sue Grafton introduced Kinsey Millhone in ‘A Is for Alibi’, and the floor was now open – whether some liked it or not – for more women to claim the tropes of private eye fiction for their own.
It’s perceived as an accolade to be published as a ‘literary’ writer, but, actually, it’s pompous and it’s fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.
‘Unbroken’ was published as a help to society.
I was so flattered that someone wanted me to write a book, I said I would. It was published in 1969.
Sometimes you have to laugh about what gets published; sometimes it’s annoying, but in general I don’t care.
I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?
Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.
The attempts to command the climate and decide about the temperature on our planet are wrong and arrogant. I wrote a book about it which was published in English under the title ‘Blue Planet in Green Shackles.’
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I’m glad that I did it.
Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn’t actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.
I always wanted to be a writer… ‘Critical Care’ was my first published work. I was 34 when it came out. I was accumulating ‘Critical Care’ for years. I would go for a whole year and not touch it. And then I’d go back to it.
It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.
I don’t read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house.
My first novel, ‘In the Drink,’ begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.
