Blog Posts for Rosemary Jones

Taking to the skies with NaNoWriMo

Rosemary Jones — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:15:36 -0800

"It's fun," insisted fellow writer Nathan Crowder so I signed up for my first NaNoWriMo. This month, I'm already committed to doing a short story for Crowder's Cobalt City Christmas Carol chapbook (try saying that three times fast!). Also I'm expecting the revisions for my story appearing Apex's Close Encounters of the Urban Kind next summer.But Nate's a persuasive guy and sometime last ...

Collecting the Oz books: gorgeous art and great stories

Rosemary Jones — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:45:38 -0700

L. Frank Baum's original fourteen Oz novels create an imaginary world filled with fantastical creatures and pragmatic little girls. While W.W. Denslow brought an Arts-and-Crafts sensibility to the original Wizard of Oz, the more graceful art of John R. Neill created the "look of Oz" for more than half of century. Long after Baum's death, Neill continued to be the illustrator of Oz, ...

Writing, D&D, and other questions answered in a perpetual interview at Loremaster.org

Rosemary Jones — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:07:05 -0700

Matt James has created a "perpetual interview" with the authors and game designers who play in the Forgotten Realms.Got a question for the Realms' creator Ed Greenwood? Or for me about writing for Wizards? Just follow Matt's directions and your question will be mailed to the author of your choice, answered, and then posted on the loremaster.org site. It's a lot of fun to pick other ...

It's always interesting to read what other people think about your writing

Rosemary Jones — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:21:01 -0700

The reviews are starting to arrive for City of the Dead and they are just plain fun or even funny. Which is good, as the book was meant to be a romp. Another kind reader sent me a note just today that he had to kick his wife out of the bedroom last night. She'd borrowed his copy of City and was giggling too much for him to sleep. But the best compliment of all? A friend ...

Sending the submission to the wrong place guarantees no sale

Rosemary Jones — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:24:03 -0700

I felt terrible, but I wrote a rejection letter last night. This nice writer sent me a wonderful query about a nonfiction book idea. Only problem: I'm not a publisher. I am the web editor for Book Publishers Northwest, a group of Washington state book publishers. The writer got my e-mail from Book Publishers Northwest's website. He saw the word "publisher" in the group's name and ...

I twitter, therefore I am: a tweet?

Rosemary Jones — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:45:46 -0700

I have resisted Twitter. After all, I own a cell phone that just makes phone calls. No camera, no texting, no nothing but incoming and outgoing calls (if I remember to turn it on).So Twitter lacked appeal. Until I started a theater column at Examiner.com and realized that some bits and pieces of news were really too short for a full article. But a "tweet" made perfect sense.Then ...

Is a slideshow worth a 1000 clicks?

Rosemary Jones — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 21:09:52 -0700

With the new gig as Seattle Theater Examiner, I'm not only worrying about words, I'm worrying about photographs. For years, I used to tell PR people who asked where to send the photos, "Please query the editor about photos. I just do the words." Actually, having also worn the PR hat for a high-faulutin' arts organization, I do know my way around a photograph and understand the ...

Becoming a web-based reporter at the Examiner.com

Rosemary Jones — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 08:33:50 -0700

Last month I wrote about how a longtime newspaper gig went the way of many newspapers: poof!Since then, Seattle's second biggest daily, the Post-Intelligencer, morphed into a web-only publication, trimming the writing staff from 160+ to 20-something folks "doing it all." I was sitting in a press reception at a local theater and heard a longtime P-I reporter bemoan the fact that he ...

Another newspaper editor bites the dust, or the Times are changing

Rosemary Jones — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:41:26 -0800

Sadly, my current editor at the Capitol Hill Times in Seattle just lost his job. He now joins an increasingly long line of good journalists in my hometown being shuffled into new professions by the current economic shakeup of the business. Besides a retrenching of the community newspapers, our second-largest daily shuts down this week. Not a good time to be a journalist looking for ...

Encyclopedia is #5 in Ephemera

Rosemary Jones — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:57:47 -0800

Today I did what authors shouldn't do. I checked my ranking on Amazon.com. As usual, the overall ranking was humbling. There is literally hundreds of thousands of books more popular than mine. But I find that in the sublists, I've actually cracked the top 10 in one category: Paper Ephemera.Encyclopedia of Collectible Children's Books was sitting at the #5 spot today. Who knows how high or how low ...