Jim C Hines is a fantasy author and a very good one at that. He wrote (among many other things) the excellent Libriomancer, however he’s almost as famous for doing incredibly awesome things on the internet. Case in point is his attempt to recreate common female character poses on Urban Fantasy covers and his subsequent pose off with John Scalzi which improved my entire year.
I also saw this morning that Jim had posted up an earnings report for 2012 which details all of his earnings from his writing over the last year. He does this every year and so his readers can track how he’s doing. This is an amazingly unusual thing for an author to do; most of us don’t mention our earnings at all for fear that other writers will see the moths fly out of our wallets.
I’m mentioning all of this as I’ve been working on goal setting a lot, and a big part of that is looking at the people you admire and modelling some of things that they do. While I can’t see myself posing in a tiny dress any time soon* I think the way Jim conducts himself as an author** is a good example to writers everywhere that we can be both professional and personable.
Go and check out Jim’s blog and you’ll see what I mean.
Who do you admire as a writer? If you want to give a shout out in the comments to good writer/writing blogs feel free to leave a link.
* While I’d be happy to scar you for life with my writing, I don’t actually want to send you blind.
** By this I mean everything from writing amazingly cool things, to the pose off to just generally keeping a fun and informative blog.
I am becoming more and more fascinated by the under-representation of women in fiction and how it’s completely unnoticed. An interesting experiment is to take almost any popular book or film and switch the genders. In the majority of cases it suddenly feels so female heavy you can’t move for women. And yet, when it’s all men, it just feels normal.
Hats off to Hines for raising this issue’s profile (not exactly the point I’m making above I know, but same lines).
Jim’s awesome. It is weird, apparently the same thing is true of speech. Statistically women actually speak roughly the same amount that men do, but women are always perceived as talking too much… humanity still has a long way to go yet.