He's not just waiting around for fame...

Scrivener tips, a new sub-genre of speculative fiction, and #booktok speed readers causing a ruckus.

Eight great things to spice up your Friday:

1. Books have a new mascot, or at least, my daughter’s school library does. Meet Eduardo. He’s a rock with big dreams. And he’s not just waiting around for fame, either. He’s already got a team of artists working to promote him as the next big thing. #LongLiveEduardo

2. My good friend Matthew Perez, who also happens to be one of our meeting leaders at A Very Important Meeting (because he’s a writer AND a badass buddhist), is part of a new publishing venture and they’re trying to decide on the cover for their first book titled “Is the Algorithm Plotting Against Us?” They’ve narrowed it down to three designs. Click here to cast your vote and be a part (okay, yes, a tiny part) of publishing history.

3. Nerd Word of the Week: Finifugal ~ (adjective) hating endings, or afraid of finishing things. (I put this one at the top of the list, in case you are feeling finifugal.)

4. I once heard an interview with Steve Martin where someone asked him how to get famous as a banjo player. He said something to the effect of “first, get really famous for doing something else.” Tom Hanks was apparently listening to that same interview and thought to himself: I’ve always kind of wanted to be an author. Since I’m already famous, it’ll be easy.

5. Next month I’ll be kicking off a lecture series I’m calling my Monthly Mini Master Classes. Each month, on the third Thursday of the month, I’ll host an online, hour-long class on a new topic. It’s a chance to share some insight on questions I often get from aspiring writers. First up: Scrivener Tips for NaNoWriMo. If you’re taking the 50,000 word challenge this year, this is a class to tune in for.

6. It was announced on Tuesday that Rebecca Solnit (author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and 17 other books) will be the eleventh recipient of the Paul Engle Prize from the UNESCO City of Literature. That’s a solid tick-mark in the you-don’t-need-an-MFA-to-be-a-writer column of the ongoing MFA debate.

7. Heads-up for anyone playing the Speculative Fiction sandbox: we have a new sub-genre to contend with (or at least we do if writer Diane Callahan has anything to say about it). She’s calling it Curio Fiction and I’m only even paying attention because she lists some of my favorite recent books as qualifying for inclusion (Every Day, The Midnight Library, The Invisible Life of Addie Larue). What say you? Do we need another sub-genre?

8. Amazon is tightening up a contractual loophole that allowed readers to return ebooks for up to 7 days (14 days in the EU) no matter how much of it they read. When the #booktok folks found out about that, promoted and abused it, they cost authors and publishers a bunch of money, so moving forward, if you’ve read more than 10% of that ebook, it’s yours for keeps.

Happy writing, my friends.

April