Writing advice for the writer who wants to be better than they were the day before
I’m a professional Hugo Award finalist editor and writer with work appearing in top publications like Rue Morgue, Tordotcom, Vice, WIRED, and more. This is my place for you, the writer who wants to learn from someone in the trenches.
I not only share my advice, but I offer advice from other professionals in the writing, editing, and publishing field. I believe you can become the writer you want to be. With this, the path will be clearer for you, too.
*The below links are all friend links so you don’t have to be a Medium member to read them…
Two years later, I got a book deal, full-time writing dream life, and over 200 stories sold, and I haven’t looked back since.
Cruel to Be Kind
Not everything that we do in life is necessary or helpful to our end goals and passions. In fact, most of the things we do are just hindrances. We scroll on our phones endlessly. Stay up way too late for our bodies and minds to function properly. Eat foods that make us sick for years and complain about the damages while not doing anything about it.
If we want to make real progress, we have to examine what’s in our lives and what we give time to. …
Updates and news from the command station
This is an edited excerpt from my readers’ group, a fan letter I share with subscribers who want to first peeks at what I’m working on, free reads, and more.
I’m holding tight here in rapid-release land. The latest project to drop was the Contamination Issue of Apparition Literary that I guest-edited. I’ve been working on that alongside my other projects and releases for the past few months and am excited to see those stories and poems out in the world.
Since my online school opened, I’ve been working on promoting and building a student base. Mostly through my other…
Are you optimizing your space for success?
Desk for Success
When you sit down at your desk, does it make you happy? Productive? Calm? Or does it make you groan, feel disorderly, or out of synch with yourself and work? Your environment is important.
Even more so if you’re a creative.
Some writers have even been able to chart advances in their career or work to when they upgraded or transformed their desk setups. I’m one of them. …
Thanks so much for reading! Glad it was helpful.
I actually go over how to find extremely specialized niche publications and how to get an editors attention in my course. I will offer some bits of advice:
-Don't think of the submitting or pitching game as a competition. It's an awful mindset to have while working as a writer.
-If you can't find any publications in your specialized niche, than your niche is too specialized and you're not thinking about the reader.
Good luck!
Examples of pitches that have landed me up to $28,000
Publish Your Stories … And Get Paid for It
Many writers are curious on how to pitch their articles to magazines and how to submit their short stories and poems to publications for pay. Pitching to magazines is a bit of a mystery to those on the outside. Submitting to publications is pretty much the same. How are writers to make their first or second or third sale when they're struggling to figure out how it all works and what a successful pitch looks like.
I recently released a course in teaching writers of all genres how to sell their writing to top publications. While talking with other writers—beginners…
These are all questions only you can answer. I choose 100 because that seemed like a manageable number and that's how many other top writers follow. When I trimmed my follower list, I cut the people whose writing didn't resonate with me.
How you go about your work on Medium is, essentially, up to you. You don't have to trim your list. I did because it was getting out of control.
You can find out how many people you are following by going to your Medium profile and clicking 'About' at the top. It'll take you to a new page on your profile that has a separate bio, lists your top writer stats, how long you've been a member, any publications that you are an editor for, and then how many people follow you and how many people you follow.
You can also click on your followers list and read through who those people are to help better steer your content toward articles that they'd read.
Claps are just a way to show appreciation to a post. It really doesn't do or mean anything. It's one of Medium's vanity metrics. It feels great to have lots of claps, but there's no monetary benefit to it. There used to be a monetary benefit to clapping and some writers are still stuck in that mindset so tell new writers that they need to focus on clapping and getting loads of them. But it doesn't matter anyway.
1 clap is the lowest you can give and 50 claps is the highest. Loads of readers and writers classify the claps in different ways, so it's hard to decipher what a reader means when they give you 22 claps over 30 claps.
The Way of the Writer
The work of a writer is never done. For many of us, it’d be hard to say where it began. It seeps its way into every aspect of our lives in ways that you wouldn’t imagine. Talking with my non-writer friends about how I see and process events and information in the world vs talking to my writing friends and colleagues shows me there is a huge gap in what writers know and what other people never consider.
It’s not that the world is filled with negativity. It’s that there are moments, events, parts of yourself and the world that…
Aigner Loren Wilson
Helping writers tell better stories and sell their work. Follow to level up your writing. Published in WIRED | The Writer | Lightspeed Magazine | Tordotcom
