Improbable Press Blog

A few writer friends and I took this personality test with ourselves in mind, which was fun, but then we took it for our most beloved original character and our most beloved fandom character. The results were a surprise we'll talk about in the next Spark newsletter.   Maybe toddle on over and put the particulars for your best-beloved in there — Sherlock Holmes or Leia Organa or the Doctor? — and see if the results inform your fic. Do they spark ideas? Reveal something you hadn't known like they definitely did for me? Talk to us below!

So this year I interviewed a couple fandom and book writers about acting. Or rather, acting out. Fic and fiction writers Verity Burns, Narrelle M Harris, and Jamie Ashbird talked briefly with me about how acting and reading their stories out makes their stories better. ATLIN MERRICK: So you three have written a lot of fic, as well as fiction for Improbable Press in our A Murmuring of Bees, and when I asked you after that about how you went about writing, all three of you surprised me in having a similar opinion on how pretending has helped you be...

On Actually Doing By Darcy Lindbergh “Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” - Earl Nightingale I’ve probably read hundreds of articles about writing right now, about putting aside the fears and excuses and putting words on the page, and agreed wholeheartedly with them. And I’ve always considered myself a writer anyway; I’ve always had stories to tell and I’ve always tried to tell them. So I was completely blindsided to realize that my own fears and excuses were stopping me from writing something bigger....

Okay. So. There's a lot been written about a scene in series four of Sherlock. Including how in "The Lying Detective" it was necessary that John Watson beat Sherlock Holmes—punching and kicking him, brutal and relentless. The scene was thematically necessary, some say, so that Sherlock would need to forgive John, just as John had to forgive Sherlock for vanishing for two years and la la la blah blah blah no no no NO NO NO. In storytelling as in real life, in all the all that there bloody well is, tit does not mean tat, balance is not a...

I got a good rejection from an agent last week. "Nope, we don't want this script. But try with something else in a couple months." It's great because they liked me enough to encourage, it sucks because they said no. If you're like me, if you're like most writers I know, know this: You're going to get rejected. You're going to get a lot of emails and mails and to-your-face words that say "Sorry, this isn't what we're looking for" and I'm pretty sure at no time is that going to be less than really hard. Hollow-in-the-belly hard. If-I-was-any-good-they-wouldn't-have-said-no-so-I-must-suck hard....