The pen is mightier than the sword.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy

Hey, guys, it’s been two mighty quick weeks of vacation, and I’m back from the Pacific Northwest. It was summer there. It might even have been summer here, too, but it was not when we left, and it’s not now, so I guess we missed it in the redwoods this year. Bummer about that.

Portland, Oregon, for those who don’t know, is a beautiful city. Truly. Clean, uncluttered, safe (compared to San Francisco), with a fabulous light-rail system and tree-lined streets, a huge, blue river, a vital downtown district, and—the cherry on the pie—Powell’s Books. In the summer it’s spectacular. My husband and I were both ready to pack up and move.

Except, of course, that it’s a city, and in real life we live on ten acres in the backwoods, where the only noise at night is the local fox barking its bizarre disco-y cough-like bark. Also, I lived in the Pacific Northwest for twelve years between the ages of 13 and 25, and I know what it’s like to survive unrelenting rain and cold for nine months out of the year.

But summertime. . .wow. We are so going back for OSCON every year from now on, for as long as they’ll take us.

Also, an amazing thing happened while I was gone. My last post, 6 Personality Types Who Will Succeed as Writers, along with its companion post, 6 Personality Types Who Will Fail as Writers, got tweeted and linked to all over the place out there, bringing in, frankly, quite a few more readers than I normally get, even when I’m here in the trenches blogging dutifully away all the time.

What do I learn from this? Apparently, I could scale way back on the blogging. So I’m going to scale way the heck back on the blogging. Because all that writing and advice was taking a lot out of me, and I have a magazine to maintain and clients to edit. In fact, I have a very full roster in August indeed.

I can’t wait.

Also, as happens every once in a great while, some unsophisticated hopeful out there reprinted an entire post on a forum, thinking—I know not why—this would make them look smart. Well, no. It doesn’t. It makes them look like they don’t understand how the Internet works or what online copyright is. It also makes them look rude.

People, I really, sincerely appreciate your appreciation. It’s happy joy-joy stuff. Gives the time I spend online meaning. Absolutely.

But please don’t be rude. And please don’t make yourself look stupid, or I’ll waste time feeling terrible for you, and that’ll interfere with my real work.

So today I’m going to refresh everyone’s memory about copyright. This is straight off my own copyright page, which you can find if you glance vaguely around my blog header for the copyright symbol.

Yep. That’s it.

Everything you write is copyrighted automatically when you write it, writers. Just so you know.

Everything on A. Victoria Mixon, Editor is copyrighted. Because I’ve written it, now, haven’t I? That means I don’t want anyone lifting any of the posts and posting them elsewhere without express written permission. (From me.) Not even just big chunks of posts.

However, there is a little wiggle room in copyright law, and there’s a good reason for this.

1) It’s okay to re-post a sentence or two or even a paragraph or two in a periodical under the copyright clause “for review purposes.” This means you’re citing it so you can express an opinion, and this loophole was originally designed to allow periodical book reviewers to spread the love. It works exactly the same way on the Internet so long as you cite it properly and include a link to the author’s site.

(If you don’t include the citation and link, it’s plagiarism—the very worst type of copyright violation—and you’ll get a Cease & Desist letter and possibly your ass sued by the rightful owner.)

Personally, I like to know if you’re doing this so I can keep track of what’s out there. But it’s okay, either way, so long as you cite it properly as coming from me and include a link to http://victoriamixon.com.

2) IMPORTANT! This wiggle room does not work for your published works that are not periodicals.

This means if you want to quote someone else in your book or novel, you or your publisher has to get their express written permission. Even for epigrams. Many authors—especially famous ones—charge for this privilege, because they and their publishers have a huge vested professional interest in making sure their works are not re-used by random authors latching onto their coattails.

Prentice Hall paid for the cartoons my co-author chose for re-print in our book. (For my money, Michael Cunningham should have had to get Virginia Woolf’s express written permission for what he did to Mrs. Dalloway’s Party in The Hours, although I’m sure her copyright holder was happy enough to endorse the checks.)

3) Links are all goodness. I link to you guys, too. The Internet is one big ole snuggly interconnected network.

Remember, everyone: copyright protects you as well as the authors you read. These laws apply to your own works, keeping the world of written words fair for everyone. It’s not a profession if you don’t get paid for your work.

And writers are professionals.

Besides, no one wants to get whacked upside the head with something even mightier than a sword.

If you wonder what can happen to a good-faith editor who happens to have been online for a long time, check out the Book Editing Associates Hall of Shame. Lynda Lotman has had a lot of her material lifted over the years by the named people and associations.

For more on copyright law, try the University of Texas at Austin (or here if you’re in the UK).

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Never doubt that thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.—Margaret Mead

Monday you got the bad news. Now you get the good news. You’re very welcome!

1. THE DILIGENT: those who sit down and write
   
   Natalie Goldberg immortalized it without words, the simple gesture of holding up a pad of paper and writing.
   
   Don’t write for publication. Don’t write for ambition. Don’t write because you keep reading the news about people even less literary than you making it in the best selling Big Time. Don’t base your dreams on greed.
   
   Write for zest and exploration and color and detail. Write as research and daydreaming and argument and creativity and hypothesizing. Write for experimentation and hallucination and entertainment and friendship and education and sheer goodness of heart. Write for amusement and revenge and anguish and, ultimately, exhaustion.
   
   Write because writing’s what you do—and what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life—even when you have nothing to write about.
   
   Guess what? You’re a writer.
2. THE IMAGINATIVE: those who are always looking for ways to liven up the party
   
   You know why so many writers have such great biographies? Because the best ones never know when to leave well enough alone. They pull up their socks and yank on their shit-kickers and go out there to face life with all their innocence and guilt and huevos shining in all directions. They pay their dues and take their chances. They shoot the rapids. They wrestle the angel. They throw themselves on the mercy of the lion.
   
   And when they sit down to write, they approach it the same way, with recklessness and bravado and sheer, uncontrolled, brain-bursting inanity. That’s how they get themselves into the tops of trees and under the bowels of the earth, on the extreme end of adventures they can’t possibly get out of in one piece, hurtling lock, stock, and barrel into outer space. And that’s how they have the stamina and endurance to drag a whole galaxy of readers along with them.
   
   

3. THE SENSITIVE: those who pay attention to their senses
   
   You were born with five, or at least most of five. They are your passport to the world of words. No matter where you go, what you do, or what you think about it, those five senses are always operating, twenty-four hours a day, rushing an infinite number of perceptions to your brain, where they are promptly transformed into concrete, vivid, material details, complete with all the trimmings.
   
   Even more than that, your brain itself sorts, classifies, and stores them all. THEM ALL. And for the rest of your life they’re there, being carted around inside that unbelievable micro-storehouse inside your brainpan and added to every instant of every second of every moment of your day. . .a constant, unending stream of fertile material.
   
   All you have to do is write it down.
4. THE INSENSITIVE: those who have a businessperson’s professional attitude toward rejection, vagaries of the industry, unforeseen disaster, yes, even self-parodying black humor
   
   Almost every single time I write one of those black humor posts, I get a whole bunch of people laughing their heads off and one unhappy person saying sadly (or not-so-sadly) and without a trace of humor, “Why are you such a big meanie?”
   
   I’m not. Truly. Read my client testimonials. I’m an old fuzzy kitty-cat, and the people who work with me on their own tender, delicate, yearning fiction are my biggest champions.
   
   But I’ve been out here in the writing business for three decades and counting, and I know if you don’t develop a sense of humor about the weaknesses and failings you yourself bring to it, it will chew you up and spit you out long, long before you ever thought you could possibly be done. The publishing industry is not out there waiting for you to bring it your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. The publishing industry doesn’t care about you and your wretched refuse. (For the record, it doesn’t care about me or mine, either.)
   
   The publishing industry is nobody’s mommy.
   
   It’s a business, that’s all. And the only way you’re ever going to succeed as a writer is by learning to laugh at yourself, alongside others just like yourself, in the spirit of camaraderie and warts-&-blemishes and cockroaches scuttling around under rocks in the dark of all those who have gone before you. Because they are legion. And when you are dead and gone, legions more will still continue to arrive on these fictional shores.
   
   Quit worrying about getting your feelings hurt and throw your arms open in joy now that you arrived here when you did. Even as we speak, you are recreating this place in your own image.
5. THE PATIENT: those who take their time, realizing life is long and a career in the arts takes the whole of it and even the greats never lived long enough to learn it all
   
   Somerset Maughm lamented it. Flannery O’Connor lamented it. You can lament it too: you will never live long enough. You can devote all the decades of your life to the craft you love and be ecstatic you did, but you will still die, like Albert Einstein, leaning out of bed with the last frail ounce of strength, grasping for a reproducable theorum of the divine.
   
   And you will know, as you lean, that you gave it your all, every day of your life: your passion and curiosity and love and devotion to this craft that means so much to so many but, especially, to you. And you will die grateful you had the chance, thanking heaven you stumbled on it while there was all that time to luxuriate in it. . .even if you became a writer only days before you died.
   
   It came to you—this extraordinary craft—as a free and unfettered gift, and you got to own it, for just a little while.
6. THE BLESSED: those upon whom the gods smile
   
   Because there is luck in all the business of humanity. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one in time plays many parts.”
   
   Get used to it. And get used to recognizing when you are blessed. It is a huge and amazing thing. It is well worth stopping and making an issue out of. You got smiled on! Break open the clouds, stand in shafts of sunlight, let the angels sing.
   
   One of the gods smiled on you.
   
   For the rest of it, well, get used to sharing that with all the rest of us, this ridiculously motley crew of hapless strugglers, drowners, fighters, dreamers out here. You think you’re alone in your natural lack of blessedness? Open your eyes and look around. You’re not alone.
   
   Truly, people. A piece of paper, a pen, a handful words, and this life of yours: that’s it. Luck comes, and luck goes. Live long enough, and you won’t be able to escape it.
   
   You are all you have.

And you have 5 Things to Celebrate About Finishing Your First Draft.

---

The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”
—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold

“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel

The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”
—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches.Highly recommended.”
—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

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This afternoon @layinda awarded me the Creative Liars Award. I’m just not sure why.

THAT’S A LIE.

I know exactly why she awarded it to me.

THAT’S ANOTHER LIE.

Huh. It’s getting kind of obvious, isn’t it?

Now, I am just getting ready to go on vacation for two weeks starting tomorrow, so this is going to be a mish-mash of nonsense (like my blog posts aren’t that anyway), and it will be incumbent upon you, dear reader, to interpret it as you see fit.

First I must thank Layinda and direct you all back to her. Thank you, Layinda! I think.

Then I must tell you seven things about myself, with the new wrinkle that I can lie.

1. I don’t know who my father’s paternal ancestors were, only that my grandfather’s grandfather was shot in the back in a vendetta killing.
2. I’m directly descended from a Colonel in the Revolutionary War and therefore eligible to be a DAR.
3. When I was ten my mother won a washing machine (and, I assume, dryer) on The Price is Right dressed as a Hershey’s kiss.
4. I can say “onion,” “crazy jackass,” and, “When love falls on a shit-pile it will still hang there,” in German.
5. My son was born in Canada.
6. My husband is French.
7. I have two middle names.

Then I must direct you to six other liars. Wow. Who’s NOT? I’m sorry, my brain is popping and fizzing like a frying egg. It took me a whole day to come up with the folks for the Versatile Blogger thing. So please refer to them. I assume they all lie. You can ask. They’ll probably lie about it.

Then I’m going to list here six classic, possibly under-exposed fiction authors because, as we all know, fiction is lying at its very best:

Jane Bowles. She’ll freak you out with her sheer artlessness. Read Two Serious Ladies, which was just re-released by Sort of Books in the UK. Then read the rest of her tiny legacy in My Sister’s Hand in Mine. Guess what? Everything you think you know about fiction IS WRONG.

Isak Denisen. The queen of layering, storytelling, abject profundity, Denisen can drop you like a pebble down a well, and you’re the one whose brain explodes when you never hit bottom.

Richard Brautigan. Strange as the day is long, he twisted the fictional form like taffy and left it torqued permanently beyond recognition. In Watermelon Sugar is my favorite because of the river in the living room, but Trout Fishing in America is another great adventure in fictional play you’ve never even considered before.

Paul Bowles. Beautiful language, beautiful imagery, beautiful juxtaposition of fact and fiction. Read his travel stories, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, and translations like A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. You think you know how to tell a story? You don’t know how to tell a story.

Horace Walpole. Read The Castle of Otranto. Just that. The little acorn from which the entire Gothic genre grew. So worth it.

Emily Bronte. Blow yourself sky-high with Wuthering Heights, then spend the rest of your life trying to reconstruct the legendary background story of Catherine and Heathcliff in the magnificent saga of Augusta Geraldine Alaisda of Gondal and her Byronic love affairs, now tantalizingly only in contradictory fragments.

All right, you guys! You’re on your own!

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DISCLAIMER: It has come to my attention that I need to point out to some folks that my blog posts are actually about their titles. So you all are hereby forewarned: This post is about its title.

If you don’t want to read about personality types who will fail as writers, hey, get out now while the gettin’s good. However, if you don’t want to read it but do it anyway, please do not feel compelled to comment that you didn’t like it. You can go write an opposite post on your own blog if it’ll make you feel any better. I promise not to read it.

1. THE WHINY: those who throw hissy fits when writing advice is hard on their tender egos.
   
   These are the people who write back to agents who send them rejection letters. You know how many acceptances those people get from those agents once they’ve let them know they’re not taking rejection lying down? I can tell you in words of one numeral.
   
   Now that the blogosphere has made good on Andy Warhol’s promise, “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” it is simply amazing how many folks are out there cleaning up the Intertubes for democracy, storming around letting other people know how dreadfully unhappy they are with the way they’re doing things. This is their use of their perceived 15 minutes. Unfortunately, they don’t stick to 15 minutes, but continue trying to throw their weight around long after everyone’s bored with them and gone on to some other blowhard.
   
   Last week I found a guy posting an extraordinarily thoughtful and lengthy letter from a mega-big literary agent saying to him, “Can we please stop?” in response to his post-rejection tantrum letter, in which he apparently not only objected mightily to the agent’s rejection of his work but also made claims for its quality he clearly could not sustain. When I picked myself up off the floor from the shock of seeing how much time and courtesy this agent had spent trying to bring a little light to the life of this amazing dimwit, I was even more appalled to read the letter he WROTE BACK, which of course he also posted.
   
   Seriously. That agent is neeeeeeeeeeever going to represent that guy. And now that he’s posted his eye-popping idiocy online, no other credible agent is going to, either.
2. THE LAZY: those who have no intention of making writing their life’s work.
   
   Sometimes I talk about what it takes to become a professional writer: learning how to write impeccably, for one; learning the ropes of the business, for another; learning all the ways to earn a living as a writer besides through fiction, for sure.
   
   And the minute I type the words “professional writer,” I hear in my head the chorus of objections from those who are writing fiction as a hobby. “We don’t want to be professional writers!” they cry. “We just want to win the lottery!”
   
   Professional writing is dull. Winning the lottery is exciting! Planning your work, meeting deadlines, taking advice without whimpering, being edited, going to business meetings, negotiating contracts, doing it when you don’t feel like it, making good on your promises, treating it like a responsibility rather than a right—that’s boring. Dreaming up a few characters out of half-remembered movies and throwing them on the page and waking up the next morning to find you’re J.K. Rowling—now that’s living!
3. THE SELF-INVOLVED: those who insist on writing only about themselves.
   
   You’ve met them in workshops and critique circles, the ones who submit, time after time, endless, mind-numbing, pointless droning on and on and on about whatever their pet peeve happens to be, styling their protagonist (almost universally in first person) as the ultimate blameless victim of fate who just—coincidentally—happens to do and say things that bring down all hell and high water on their own faultless little heads. Oh, the injustice. In sleep-inducing detail. “I woke up. My bed was just like it was yesterday, when I also woke up. I got up and got dressed. I brushed my teeth and spit in the sink. I rinsed my mouth and looked in the mirror, thinking about myself. I went in the kitchen to see if everyone in there was thinking about me, too. They weren’t! They were talking about their own stuff! Of all the NERVE.”
   
   Here’s a tip: if even the people in your critique group keep saying your protagonist is unsympathetic, there is no way in hell anyone’s ever going to pay you for that privilege.
4. THE DISGRUNTLED: those who are already mad they don’t make enough.
   
   Hey, you know what’s a bad idea when you think you don’t earn what you’re worth? Going into a field people work just for the love of it even when they have to move back in with their parents.
   
   Then quitting your day job.
   
   In the UK you people have the Dole. It’s not so easy here in the US. You know who lives under bridges? That’s right. Lots of really pissed-off people who quit their jobs in a huff the minute they got an agent—any agent—completely clueless about the publishing industry in general and their own teeny, tiny little role in it in particular.
   
   Remember the Vogon ultimate torture chamber in The Hitckhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Where you see the entire universe in all its enormity and your own dust spec of a self diminished down to its actual subatomic particularity? This is you. This is you without a day job.
   
   Even George Clooney appeared in a zillion unmemorable TV shows and movies for SIXTEEN YEARS before he got “discovered” on ER. I remember. He was really good. All of you with less talent and inherent compatibility with your medium than George Clooney can multiply that number by the number of years you were doing something else before you decided to throw your hat in the ring for this craft.
   
   And you thought you were disgruntled before.
5. THE UNREALISTIC: those who have No Idea what the publishing business is really like.
   
   Are you a Twilight enthusiast? A Bella-Wannabe? Mooning endlessly over Bella’s identification with Wuthering Heights and thinking the only thing as great as being the author of Edward would be being the author of Heathcliff?
   
   Just so you know: the author of Heathcliff was dissed by her publisher, left unpublished until he could ride the coattails of her sister Charlotte, then published in a terrible edition with sloppy typesetting and cheap paper, and ignored by the reading public, who found Heathcliff—beyond reprehensible—downright disgusting. Emily Bronte was a bonafide literary genius whose greatest work, a saga in verse, was altered after her death against her passionately-clear wishes by busybody Charlotte and re-published in its mutilated form, although half the poems had vanished by then and have never been recovered. Emily Bronte died young, unloved, unhappy, unfulfilled. Undiscovered.
   
   And the author of Edward can’t write for beans. She stumbled on a misogynist aspect of our culture she could exploit in impressionable kids, along with a really good marketer. That really good marketer is now busy with Twilight, and you are in their backwash.
6. THE UNIMAGINATIVE: those who look at published garbage and say, “I can write that.”
   
   Why, yes. Yes, you probably can. So can a monkey. Are you as smart as a monkey? Congratulations.
   
   And you will suffer the fate of those authors: you will spend endless hours sending hundreds of queries to agents who want nothing to do with you until you stumble across one desperate enough to take a risk, all the while telling yourself, “You’ve got to persevere,” without wasting so much as an iota of your perseverance on learning the craft.
   
   You might even be a hardcore-enough marketer to push for publication until someone gives in and publishes you. Then you will get your head all puffed up with grandiose ideas of your own importance because you got a book on a shelf (as though the authors of all that other garbage didn’t have exactly the same thing), and you will be thrilled to have your name all over crap a dog wouldn’t read, and no one over the long run will take you seriously because you treated a craft many, many people love with all their souls as a quickie money-making gimmick.
   
   People will point to your book at garage sales and say, “What garbage! I can write better than THAT.”
   
   And on your deathbed—if you have gleaned any type of intelligence from your life experience at all—what finally kills you won’t be pneumonia or heart attack or old age but the utter and total humiliation of being known as the author of shlock, part of the lowest-common-denominator that not only did not maintain the quality of fiction in your era but actually dragged it down below the garbage you once thought you were so damned better than.
   
   Yeah. On behalf of everyone who takes this craft seriously: thanks.

UPDATE from Twitter: @rd_morgan “6 Personality Types Who’ll Fail as Writers” Or: 6 Personality Types Who’ll Inevitably Be in Yr #MFA Prog.

Coming up next: 6 Personality Types Who Will Succeed

---

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”
—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold

“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel

The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”
—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches.Highly recommended.”
—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

Subscribe:

1. You didn’t know you had that many words in you.
   
   And no, they’re not all just variations on “and then.” They’re all possible variations on twenty-six simple little letters, higgledy-piggledy arrangements of sound and thought and meaning, and the images that leap out of them are a magic of physical manifestation that put you in actual touch with something you can’t explain but know now no one has ever lived without.
   
   The miracle of fiction.
2. The party in your head just got a little more fun.
   
   It used to just be you and your alter-egos, the Nice You and the Mean You. Most of that was full-contact wrestling between the Nice You and the Mean You, with the Real You standing by, shaking your head, and saying, “Hey, guys. . .guys. . .guys! It’s getting kind of warm in here—”
   
   But now that’s only a minor aspect to the 24-hour excitement. Now the main stage is taken by a whole host of riveting characters meeting, talking, dancing, sparring, lying, confessing, stealing, recovering, moving and moving and moving around each other in an infinite choreography of fascination. The temperature’s gone way up. . .and YOU DON’T MIND AT ALL.
3. You’re smarter than you used to be.
   
   You know so much more about words and what they can do, language and what it’s meant for, communication and why we need it to survive. You also know far more than you ever have about human nature and how the thousands of interactions between people even in a single day add up to life and what it’s all about.
   
   You even get—in an ethereal and intangible sort of way, when the wind is right—how the whole of humanity is greater than the sum of its parts.
4. You’re more alive than you used to be.
   
   Your careful, note-taking attention to vivid details has made your world vastly more of an experience for you. You hear more things, see more things, feel more things. When you’re miserable you can identify a hundred nuances, when you’re laughing you hear the interweave and cacophony of how voices blend and emerge, when you’re quiet your physical self is so alive it’s like you’re on drugs. And free! Without hangovers!
5. You’re saner than you used to be.
   
   Now and for the rest of your life, even when you’re overwhelmed, you still have this foundation on which to stand: the incessant inquiry into, What is happening to me? What are its significant and insignificant parts? How am I reacting? What do I understand about it? What if it’s something other than what I’ve always assumed it was?
   
   Your options for understanding yourself and others are opening outward in all directions like eyes seeing for the very first time.
   
   And even more importantly, your options for understanding your own beliefs about reality and meaning are far more complex, profound, and intriguing than ever before.
   
   You’ve gone to the core. You’ve wrestled with the angel.
   
   And the angel has taught you—just a smidgen of—their secrets.

---

The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”
—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold

“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel

The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”
—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches.Highly recommended.”
—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

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