{"id":429,"date":"2014-11-19T18:56:37","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T23:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/?p=429"},"modified":"2015-09-19T10:18:33","modified_gmt":"2015-09-19T15:18:33","slug":"sage-advice-from-one-of-the-posse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/?p=429","title":{"rendered":"Sage advice from one of the Posse"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a>Mark Sumner has been writing on DailyKos for quite a while now. Recently, he’s written two articles on the Posse:<\/p>\n

Do you want to build a writers group?<\/a><\/h2>\n

With good stuff like…<\/p>\n

Save the creativity for your writing<\/b><\/em><\/span>
\n That’s not to say you shouldn’t have fun at your meetings. Maybe you want to have a Johnny Cash impersonator serenade an author who just sold a western or build a cake in the shape of the Temple of the Sun to celebrate the sale of a book about the Mayans (both of these things happened at AH meetings). But where you shouldn’t get creative is in how you handle reviewing material. \u00a0Print out your book. Hand a copy to everyone. Give them a month to read through it, read through it again, and mark it up. Then get together and go through it, page by bloody red-pen saturated page.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n

Be prepared to spend long hours.\u00a0Don’t<\/b>\u00a0read aloud from your work.\u00a0Don’t<\/b>\u00a0ask people to provide spontaneous reviews of works you’ve shoved in their hands minutes before.\u00a0Don’t\u00a0<\/b>dump 100k words in their laps a couple of days before the meeting and pout because no one has made it through. Suck it up, do it right, give it time.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n

And…<\/p>\n

My first novel in 15 years.<\/a><\/h2>\n

Mark tells all about his writing career and the development of\u00a0The Naturalist.<\/em><\/p>\n

By then, I had achieved a simmering low boil of frustration leading to burnout. A career that had looked promising one moment, had become an endless, thankless grind for pay so low that I could have topped it doing night shifts at Burger Doodle. I put down my metaphorical pen, brushed off a moth-eaten jacket, and went back to beg for an office job.<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n

It took me a long time to get my “Once upon a time” back…<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n

Yes, we really did have “Tommy Cash, Another Great Country & Western Musical Tradition” show up to a meeting, to sing the classic “Antriders in the Sky.” \u00a0Seriously.<\/p>\n

Here’s the proof.<\/p>\n

\"img282\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Quill-3-512\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Sumner has been writing on DailyKos for quite a while now. Recently, he’s written two articles on the Posse: Do you want to build a writers group? With good stuff like… Save the creativity for your writing That’s not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.wordposse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}