Visionary writers are incredibly important to the publishing landscape. And yet, the “visionary” label of this broad set of writers can confuse unfamiliar readers or put off publishers afraid to take risks.
Visionary writers are incredibly important to the publishing landscape. And yet, the “visionary” label of this broad set of writers can confuse unfamiliar readers or put off publishers afraid to take risks.
Visionary writers are incredibly important to the publishing landscape. And yet, the “visionary” label of this broad set of writers can confuse unfamiliar readers or put off publishers afraid to take risks.
Editing is deconstruction and reduction; it’s creation by negation. It’s a completely different skill from the invention of story. Yet the modern author is expected to be their own editor. We must pick apart what we have spent months painstakingly assembling and say…no, never mind—not this, not that, this sentence is good, that one is…
A friend recently recommended I check out Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, which I took as a not-so-subtle hint about my writing. This didn’t surprise me; clarity is one of the biggest problems facing any author. Despite the renown directive “write what you know”, we writers, being at least as…
I first met John Crye through a media company in Los Angeles. He has deep roots in theater and film, which covers experience as a writer, producer, actor, and director. For more than a decade, John was Creative Director of Newmarket Films, working in the development, acquisition, production, and distribution of such independent classics as Whale…
Modern technology thrives by improving upon itself, and nowhere is the blizzard of innovation more overwhelming than in the publishing industry. The self-publishing author must be on constant alert for change.
Self-publishing and using the services of a self-publishing company can be vastly different in cost, time, and skill required. The goal is to deliver the book to the reader in a pleasing format at a reasonable price that adequately compensates the writer.
There is sufficient evidence to hypothesize that reincarnation is real—whether one believes in it or not. In other words, once we enter the human zone between the material and spiritual universes, we don’t get to exit without a diploma. It’s either mastery of the human condition or repeat until you get it right.
The stranglehold that Justinian’s Council of Constantinople placed on the concept of reincarnation and the Gnostic approach to truth through personal experience held fast for about a millennium. But there’s an odd thing about truth, especially those dealing with fundamental principles. It is resilient; it keeps coming back until it is recognized as valid. And so it happened with the doctrine of reincarnation.
This 3-part series focuses on the role of reincarnation, one of the more complex of the paranormal phenomena encountered in the visionary environment. With it as an example, I hope to illustrate that the various psychic elements are actual features in the visionary realm we inhabit, just as stars, planets, mountains and oceans are part of our physical environment.
Around the turn of the millennium, several of us authors-without-a-genre had a vision that we framed into words on the then-Yahoo Visionary Literature Forum.
Let’s suppose, as projected in Part 1 of this series, “The Bucket,” that Visionary Fiction has become as prominent a genre label as Science Fiction or Mystery. Now let’s consider the ingredients writers must put into a work to have it qualify for the Visionary Fiction bucket and what experiences or benefits readers can expect in a work pulled out of that bucket.
By Victor E. Smith
“We tried mightily to get the retailing powers to start a visionary fiction shelf. We came close with Walden, but the suits at B&N, alas, took the position of ‘no one is coming into the store asking for visionary fiction’,” said editor Bob Friedman of the situation as he saw it at Hampton Roads Publishing some years ago.
Flybys are not flukes. At first they may seem to appear by accident, luck or chance, which, if true, would make them a dastardly unpredictable source for a visionary story or anything else of worth. While keeping aside the worthy argument that nothing is truly accidental, let’s look at ways to increase the odds of returning from the hunt laden with healthy flybys .
Where do the ideas and visions that eventually become complex cities and timeless books come from? I don’t know actually—how to blunt a piece from the get-go! However, I do know that they first show up as blip of light barely large and lasting enough to evoke a “What the heck was that?” It gets a smidge of our attention before it flicks on by.
Monty Joynes’ achievements are too many and his writings, Visionary Fiction and otherwise, too numerous and varied to cover in the space allotted to a single post. Here I can just hope to put enough, garnished with links leading deeper, to arouse VF authors to curiosity about the life and work of a writer who deserves to be studied and emulated as a stellar model of both the spirit and substance, the art and the craft, of visionary fiction.
As an author maybe you’ve been there. You sit behind a table with a stack of books in front of you and wait. That’s it; you wait. Why not liven things up a bit? Sponsor an event instead of a simple book signing. Think an interactive author appearance…engage your audience and connect with readers….
What follows is a compilation of several posts Maria Barry made to the Visionary Fiction Group blog on Goodreads.com. She agreed to our reposting them, with a few editorial liberties, here on the VFA site. About Maria Barry I am a publisher/publicist, part of the UK based John Hunt Publishing Ltd. My background is mind,…
By Eleni Papanou In the not so distant past, writing felt more like a chore. It took ten screenplays and one badly written novel to admit I never felt satisfied with what I produced. It seemed like I wrote only to satisfy an audience, which made the experience hollow. Longing to create something more personal,…
Guest post by Randy Davila Visionary fiction authors have one of the hardest jobs as writers—to both entertain their readers and to introduce them to new metaphysical topics, which the readers may have never been exposed to before. The most successful authors, of any type of fiction, understand that the first purpose of their book…