Improbable Press Blog — Atlin Merrick

By Atlin Merrick This post was originally born from rage after reading the strong, wise words of Wheeloffortune-Design, and with that rage my primary thoughts were…obscured for some. So I’m rewriting this to clarify what I mean by write your desire, and it has to do with write what you know. And that doesn’t mean what people think it means. I need not be a carpenter to write about carpenters. I need not be male to write about men, I do not have to be a wizard, LGBTQIA+, or autistic to write characters who are any or all of these...

Yes I’m a little tardy, but I'm here to celebrate Bisexual Awareness five days late and to shout out that we want, we want, we so very much want your books with bisexual characters. We want the gamut of LGBTQIA+ people, and though I know you know what those letters stand for just in case I'll say it super-clear: we would love to see a novel from you with lesbian characters, gay, bisexual and trangender characters, we want your queer and intersex and asexual characters and yep, yes demi and pan and hetero, too. We love publishing erotic and romantic...

Can you even make a clickable link with the number one? I don't know. Everything nowadays is "5 Cool Tips!" and "14 Impossible Ways!" But I just have one. One single tip for interviewing famous folks, and I'm not even going to tease out the answer, which is this: Go and ask them. That's what I did, I went and I asked. See, I have a book on fanfiction coming out next year, and for it I hoped to get the opinions of successful writers who'd themselves written, or spoke well of, fic. I wanted the words of writers I...

Atlin Merrick and Natalie Conyer share thoughts on writing, in their She Said/She Said series, entries alternating between Improbable Press and Clan Destine Press. NATALIE: For nearly four months now – yes, that’s right, four months – I’ve wrestled with the start of a new book. Every day I write something, agonise over it, pronounce it unworthy and delete it. It’s agony, and I’m getting nowhere.Then I realised I’m ignoring one of writing’s cardinal rules. I’ve been trying to produce the perfect draft straight up, instead of doing what all writers need to do; that is, to start off by...

By Atlin Merrick "…you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside." Audre Lorde's famous essay The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action includes this quote from her daughter Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, and I love it. Those words are direct, she said what she said damn it, and those...