About Noël

I live in Northern New England, am a transplanted 14th generation Virginian (and yes, I like New England, too). I’m a free-lance writer and yes, I make a real, live living doing that. I read a whole lot, knit, design my own clothes and generally enjoy life.

The old version of this had this diatribe about how I was a writer, dammit, even if I wasn’t really published, but that I didn’t care because I was writing, dammit… Blah, blah, blah.

I do care. I do want to be published. I want to earn a living writing fiction. I’m working on it (though these days, I write a hell of a lot more non-fiction). No, I don’t mean, “I’m going to parties and talking about the novel I am writing”, or blogging about it to make myself look good. No. My increasingly shapely ass is in a chair, I meet my daily word count for my project (1,000 words a day, if you want to know), and I have a project outline and marketing plan to sell the book to a reputable publisher. <grin> Let’s face it, if J.K. Rowling had a pound for every person who was “writing a novel”, meaning talking about instead of doing it — Oh wait… She does, doesn’t she?

I have absolutely no patience with people who say, “Oh, I’d like to write a novel someday.” Shut up, sit your ass down and write it. If you don’t know how to go about it, check out Holly Lisle’s articles for writers. It’s a good jumping off point. She has stuff on writing marketable fiction and a lot of good advice and links. Oh, and she makes a living at it, which means you’re taking the advice of someone who knows what she is doing from experience.

Other than that, there isn’t much to tell. I mean, someone sitting with her laptop drinking coffee ain’t exactly the stuff of exciting prose, now is it?

4 Responses

  1. Erick Says:

    Greetings,
    I know you from another mail list which you oversaw long ago. I know it sounds trite but, “I thought of you when I saw this.”

    http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/02/harpercollins-authon.html

    It is web site just opened by the publisher Harper-Collins to help unpublished authors promote their work.

    As an aside, whenever I feel grumpy and I ponder what I ‘need’ – your Recipe for World Peace often comes to mind and I appreciate your concise formula. (which was nearly alluded to in a web comic “Questionable Content” panel)

    Hoping that you and yours are well.

  2. Noël Says:

    Well the recipe for world peace was actually invented by our very own Mad Pirate Bippy. I hope I’d said so on the article I wrote about it, as I’d never want to take credit for another’s brilliance.

  3. Erick Says:

    Perhaps my personal motto, “vague on the details,” would look more impressive in Latin with a fancy script. Thank you, that does make some more neurons fire now that you mention it. I think it was last election season where my health started to shift and I found I needed to simplify my time and mailing lists — much to my regret. Maybe it is just election time that dulls the senses…

  4. C.P. Says:

    Hey, saw your post on “25 and Over” on Tomato Nation, and you mentioned a study presumably relating to neural vs. social maturity conducted at Dartmouth.

    Seeing as I’m a neuroscience major at Dartmouth, any chance you could email me a link or .pdf to the study or anything? I’d be curious who’s running it.

    Thanks!

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