Noël Lynne Figart

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?