#WritersCoffeeClub
How do you select ideas from all the ones floating around?
My stories usually come when some person, or an image of them, an action they're doing, a location they're in, etc, gets stuck in my head. Usually there's a strong emotional feel attached. My new book, for instance, started when I was dozing away one morning and in my head a woman woke up next to a dead body and said, "Oh, no. Not again." That made me sit up.
Have you queried agents for traditional publishing? How did it go?
Yes, and I have one or two really nice rejection letters to prove it!
I also have plenty of others that are just form rejections, and I’m pretty sure many (most?) of them never actually read the sample chapters I sent, because my query letter didn’t meet their expectations.
Given how low the barriers to self-publishing have become, I’ve decided to go down that route instead.
If my writing is received well enough, then maybe some trad publishers will come knocking. Who knows.
I get my ideas early in the morning. I'll sort of wake up and be dozing away, then these people come into my head. Often they are doing something and I don' know why.
The main character in my upcoming book woke up next to a dead body and said, "Oh, no. Not again." It took me MONTHS to work out why the fuck she said that.
As educators and scientists, we can and should communicate clearly that generative AI tools are not sentient, have no capacity for truth, and are merely complex statistical algorithms dressed up in a plain language outfit.