Check it out: my new post at the fantastic WriteSex site just went up. Here's a tease (
for the rest you'll have to go to the site):
There’s no doubt about it, things are really tough right now: aside from the depression/recession that seems to be killing publishers daily—and making life even harder for writers—there’s the too-often- painful transition from print to digital books, and the problem of getting yourself heard in a world full of other authors screaming for attention.
So it’s only natural that writers would feel a lot of pressure to write books and stories to fit what they think is the flavor-of-the-moment, to work only to spec.
So, should you do it? In my opinion the answer is a definitive, absolute, certain … kind of.
Before getting too far into it, I should back up a tiny bit and say that stories are very different—no duh—critters than novels. Aside from the obvious length thing, the big difference between the two is that with stories getting the out into the world usually depends on if you’re writing for a specific anthology, Web site, and such. If that’s the case then, absolutely, you should work to try and meet the guidelines set by the publisher or editor.
[
MORE]