“Follow your own weirdness.” – Annie Dillard
Via PBW, Jordan Summers has posted some very interesting information from the publisher spotlights at RWA.
Books that recently arrived in the mail:
Eternal Nights by Patti O’Shea
Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
In Fact: The Best of Creative Non-Fiction edited by Lee Gutkind
The Best American Science and Nature Writing edited by Jonathan Weiner & Tim Folger
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
Iron Council by China Mieville (who I swore I would never read again because he’s just too depressing)
But I am reading! Yay! I know that seems ridiculous to be jubilant about, but it’s amazing how much time it takes to write a book, and how difficult it is (for me, anyway) to sit down and read after a long day at the computer. It’s hard for my mind to settle into a story, because I’m still thinking about everything I just wrote. And if my mind does settle into the novel I picked up, then that means the story I’m holding is extraordinarily good. Because anymore, I can’t force myself to finish reading books I don’t like.
In one of the comments, idreamofthee asked: “Just out of curiosity, what do you do when you’re stuck?”
Besides bang on the computer? 
When I’m stuck, it usually means something has gone wrong with the story. I seem to be quoting a lot of Annie Dillard lately, but she has this to say: “In every work, there’s an inherent impossibility which you discover sooner or later—some intrinsic reason why this will never be able to proceed. You can figure out ways around it. Often the way around it is to throw out, painfully, the one idea you started with.”
I’ve never thrown out a whole story, but I’ve thrown out 10,000 words of a beginning, or 20,000 of a middle, and started all over again. Insane? Maybe, but it got the book rolling . Of course, I tend to believe that I make more work for myself than I really need to. Which is why I’m dedicating myself to a fresh start, one where I try to ignore my feelings about my writing. As Annie Dillard says, “These are an occupational hazard.”