I have this nifty idea ...Now what do I do with it. This book contains outlines for science fiction and fantasy novels which real authors (new and old) used to sell their books to major publishing companies ...actual examples drawn from authors' files, not idealized versions prepared just for a textbook. Whether you're a beginning writer looking to break into novels, an experienced professional seeking new tools and techniques to sell books, or a fan curious about the remarkable thought-processes of some of the great genre writers of our time, you will find something here which enlightens, educates, and entertains you. I Have This Nifty Idea is the perfect addition to every library of books on writing. Includes works by Robert Silverberg, David Brin, Joe Haldeman, Mike Resnick, Robert J. Sawyer, Barry N. Malzberg, Kevin J. Anderson, Charles Sheffield, Katharine Kerr, Jack Dann, Jack L. Chalker, and many more.

Every life passage we go through shapes us, each one differently, each one forever. Often we tend to think there are only a few of these -- childhood, adolescence, middle years, old age. In this book you'll find that there are many more, and it is only by understanding them that we can come to know fully who we are. Sometimes, though, it feels as if we're so busy living we just don't have the chance to put our lives in any sort of perspective. This book can give you that chance, and supply that perspective.

In these pages you will find the tools you need to come to a deeper understanding of yourself, so you can claim your selfhood and live your life more fully. You'll learn that you can do much of this work yourself, and that you don't have to rely on the specialists for meaningful self-exploration to occur.

In these pages you will find a series of writing exercises (and sometimes drawing exercises, too) all of which are designed to help you reflect on your life so that you can understand yourself better. The exercises will give you the tools of the trade, that can enable you to undertake the vital work of personal exploration yourself, rather than having to rely on the experts -- the psychiatrists, the analysts, the therapists -- in the way that many of us tend to do now.

Do you dream of -

Crossing the galaxies?

Living in the far future?

Entertaining millions with your imagination?

This book can help make those dreams come true!

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy brings you expert advice on how to craft and market tales of the fantastic. Award-winning writers such as John Barnes, James Patrick Kelly, Norman Spinrad, Connie Willis, and Jane Yolen reveal some of their secrets of crafting believable stories, while Grand Masters Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein provide timeless advice for beginners and veterans alike. The editors also provide valuable insights into the process by which stories get published and they offer helpful hints on getting your story out of the slush pile and into print.

Willis treats the writing of fiction as a natural process that anyone can do with pleasure. The book includes over 400 helpful writing assignments for all age levels. In addition, teachers will appreciate the appendixes on writing ideas according to age level, other books on writing, and magazines that publish student writing. "A terrific resource for the classroom as well as the novice writer."-Harvard Educational Review.

An illuminating guide to finding one's most powerful writing tool, "Finding Your Writer's Voice "helps writers learn to hear the voices that are uniquely their own. Mixing creative inspiration with practical advice about craft, the book includes chapters on:
Accessing raw voice
Listening to voices of childhood, public and private voices, and colloquial voices
Working in first and third person: discovering a narrative persona
Using voice to create characters
Shaping one's voice into the form of a story
Reigniting the energy of voice during revision

Most screenplay writing books instruct on three-act structure, character arcs, and how to format a script. But most screenplay writing books have been made obsolete by screenplay writing software. The Secrets Of Film Writing tells a working writer's secrets—how to get it down on paper, how to get it read, how to get it sold.

Moreover, Lazarus tells aspiring screnwriters why they shouldn't use montage sequences, why "cut to" is obsolete, why actors pick scripts out of a stack, and what to do when an idea doesn't work. Not to mention how to pitch, how to follow up, how to polish, and how to present your work. This is the nitty-gritty on writing for the silver screen from a popular UCLA instuctor.

This book guides students through the process of planning, researching, and writing the final version of theses and dissertations. Five major stages of the process are illustrated with multiple examples from the social and behavioral sciences, humanities, and such allied fields as education, social work, and business administration. The first stage, Preparing the Way, describes problems and alternative solutions in working with faculty advisors and in searching the professional literature. Stage 2 explains how to find good research topics and define them clearly for presentation to faculty advisors.

Stage 3 describes problems often encountered in data collection and suggests solutions for those problems. At Stage 4, students learn ways of organizing and interpreting information, including classification schemes, verbal and statistical summaries, and methods of deriving meaning from data. The final stage, Presenting the Finished Product, offers guidelines for thesis and dissertation writing and for publishing the results in such media as books, journal articles, and popular periodicals. Stage 5 also includes a chapter about how students can mount a convincing defense of their work during a faculty committee's final oral examination session.

Over 300 time-saving model business letters!

A virtual business-in-a--book, The McGraw-Hill Handbook of More Business Letters helps you smoothly and effectively handle just about any business scenario youll ever encounter. From product announcements to responses to complaints. From hard-working sales letters to contract negotiations, nondisclosure agreements, requests for payment and scores more! Here are 300 new, time- and work-saving letters you can use to avoid procrastination and unprofessional delays. Author Ann Poe — who also wrote the popular McGraw-Hill Handbook of Business Letters, — puts even more useful, up-to-date information at your fingertips:


*Suggestions on how to get the most from your computer


*Guidance on form and style to make your letters, memos, and faxes look great


*Tips for using e-mail to its best advantage


*Advice on security and protecting private business information


Get your copy today!

More than just a "how to" reference, this guide weaves an inspiring, engaging read with invaluable instruction for turning personal experiences into salable prose. It includes nuts-and-bolts writing instruction, creative exercises, information on the hows and whys of keeping a journal, and suggestions on networking, humor, acceptance and rejection.

Daugherty provides an insider's perspective on how magazines work and where freelancers fit in, so you can learn how to generate saleable ideas. Even if you've never written before, he makes it easy, using hands-on exercises and easy-to-achieve assignments to get you started right away. From short fillers and sidebars to interviews and how-to articles, you'll get an overview of the kinds of pieces magazines are seeking, and you'll learn how to write manuscripts and query letters that will sell your work. Daugherty also shares effective ways to manage the "writing life," from dealing with rejection to finding time to write undisturbed. There's even a special section on how to speak "magazine" so you can act like a pro when dealing with editors.

Explores the essentials of solid, point-based paragraphs, with chapters on unifying each paragraph around one point, developing paragraphs in a variety of interesting ways, binding sentences within the paragraph, and creating smooth transitions. A catalog of exemplary paragraph patterns, supported with clear diagrams, gives readers models to follow and options to consider.

Frederick Busch, one of America's most distinguished novelists, has had an enduring love affair with great books and with the difficult, and sometimes personally dangerous, work that is required to produce them. For Busch, as he writes of his own career and those of his great elders, Dickens, Melville, Hemingway, and others, there was to be no other recourse save the dangerous profession. Writing out of an experience of risk that is suffused with affection, Busch brilliantly explores the hazards of the writing life and its effect on the achievement of benchmark writers.

One of the most popular and respected style guides ever written, this handbook by a seasoned writer with more than forty years of experience offers ten principles and seven axioms that professional writers use to express their thoughts clearly and effectively. This latest edition is expanded to include an extensive glossary of American idiomatic expressions, developed to assist users from other backgrounds and cultures; new chapters with tips on little-known facts of usage, such as compound words, hyphenation, numeration, and capitalization; and explanations of technical problems encountered in writing and editing with tips and exercises to help solve them. For anyone faced with the challenges of written English, Writing with Precision can help readers write more clearly, more effectively, and more precisely than they ever have.

The first volume of the serial is dedicated to writing, merely for the reason that writing can still be considered in language education to be a skill to which little attention is paid, where as discourses on listening, reading, and especially speaking experienced major advances over the last two decades. With the intention to question this rather international tendency from as many as possible different perspectives, this book unifies articles from Switzerland and Italy, Denmark, Germany, and the US, dealing with French, Italian, German, and English as foreign or second languages in all levels of instruction. The aim of this first volume is mainly to encourage the understanding of an expanded function of writing in the field of language education, in theoretical terms and within the framework of classroom practice. Writing is understood here not only as a tool for recording knowledge but also as a means of developing it. Writing seen as such reaches beyond the realm of a foreign language, connecting the learners expertise of his/her native language and culture with the ones to be studied. When we acknowledge language as a social phenomenon, the potential uses of writing for learning across the curriculum are revealed.

Offers more than 100 model sentence types in a catalog format, giving writers many interesting and provocative ways to say what they mean. Writers looking for a more striking way to open a sentence will find these options: the announcement, the editorial opening, the opening appositive, the opening absolute, and the conjunction opening, among others. Examples of each sentence type ensure the reader's understanding of the concepts.

Here's how to find inspiration from neighbors and strangers, reshape classic tales, cull current events and use other tricks of the writing trade so effectively you'll soon find yourself brimming with ideas, your imagination revved to its full potential. Begin with a snippet of overheard conversation, an unexpected event, a simple character trait, a place, a problem--Ms. Stanek teaches you to get past "what really happened" and reinvent reality in ways that will astound and delight you, and hold a reader's attention.

Here too are hundreds of "what-ifs," simple situations you can guide to endlessly different conclusions--and use to learn new ways to fashion plot, describe character, develop conflict, paint with language, create a setting, employ flashbacks, build suspense, and much, much more. For every writer who could use a jump-start, from novice to pro, here is a book that will help you keep the faith and. . .

This bibliography is a compilation of 15 short bibliographies published in an issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing from January 1993 to September 1997. The work focuses on theoretically grounded research reports and essays addressing issues in second and foreign language writing and writing instruction, containing 676 entries, each including a 50+ word summary intended to be non-evaluative in nature. The editors hope that this work will be a useful tool for developing theory, research, and instruction in second language writing.

With grace and insight, celebrated writer bell hooks untangles the complex personae of women writers. Born and raised in the rural South, hooks learned early the power of the written word and the importance of speaking her mind. Her passion for words is the heartbeat of this collection of essays. Remembered Rapture celebrates literacy, the joys of reading and writing, and the lasting power of the book. Once again, these essays reveal bell hooks's wide-ranging intellectual scope; she is a universal writer addressing readers and writers everywhere.

With an emphasis on key individuals and key movements, this book is the first attempt to provide a collection of critical essays on the history of technical communication designed to help guide future research. This collection consists of the classic; essays in the field that have made a major contribution to the development of the field, and the new; essays that contribute to our historical understanding of a specific element or period of technical communication. This, combined with an up-to-date bibliography of research in the area, make Three Keys to the Past as valuable to the experienced researcher in the field as to those just entering it.

An analysis of the rhetoric of science in the evolution of American ornithological discourse. It covers: the emergence of American ornithological discourse; discourse models for natural history and experimental science; diachronic changes; and more.

Substance, Style, and Strategy grows out of the author's experience teaching advanced composition and incorporates his belief that an advanced writing course offers refinement of the mind. It makes vague thoughts explicit and examinable. The first chapter discusses issues of subject, audience, style, and the writing process. In the following five chapters, the student acquires proficiency in writing the personal essay, the biographical essay, the argumentative essay, the familiar essay, and the critical essay. Each essay form is demonstarted through examples that are analysed in depth. The many 'tips' boxes throughout the text expand the content of each chapter with detailed practical advice.

"Writing is a second chance at life," writes Jane McDonnell. "I think all writing constitutes an effort to establish our own meaningfulness, even in the midst of sadness and disappointment." In Living to Tell the Tale, McDonnell draws on this impulse, as well as her own experiences as a writer and teacher of memoir, to give us what should become the definitive book on writing "crisis memoirs" and other kinds of personal narrative. She provides specific techniques and advice to help the writer discover his or her inner voice, recognize and then silence the inner censor, begin a narrative, and develop it with such aids as photographs and documents. Citing many landmark works such as Maxine Hong Kingston?s The Woman Warrior and Frank McCourt's Angela?s Ashes, as well as unpublished writings, McDonnell shows how writers can recreate past experiences through memories, and imaginatively reshape material into the story that needs to be told. Each chapter concludes with exercises to help the writer grapple with particular problems, such as trying to write about experiences that are only partly recalled. McDonnell also offers a list of recommended reading.

• Memoirs such as Mary Karr's The Liars Club (Penguin)?have hit bestseller lists nationwide during the past year, and are of great interest to aspiring writers.

In this timesaving reference book, respected author and historian Kristine Hughes brings 19th century England to life as she leads you through the details that characterize this fascinating era. From slice-of-life facts, anecdotes and firsthand accounts, to sweeping timelines and major historical events, this guide presents the delightful and often surprising daily realities of Regency and Victorian England. With it, you'll craft a vibrant story as you learn what people ate, from pigeon pie and turtle dinners to syllabub and milk punch, where a prisoner would go if he were remanded to the "hulks; " the four coats a gentleman must have in his wardrobe, and other fashion requirements of the era; the rules honored by decent society, from the proper way to promenade to the polite hours to "call; " how couples married and divorced, through churching, wife-selling and other practices; what people did for work, from cottagers and climbing boys to milkmaids and manservants; the meaning of common slang words like mawleys and moleskins; what Cook's Tours were life and where they could take the adventurous; and trends in entertainment, such as dandies, panoramas and more.

"Writing at Work" is for people who do or will write while on the job whether the writing be an interoffice memo, e-mail, a status report, a lab report, marketing materials, or a letter to a customer. The philosophy behind "Writing at Work" is that such writing needn't be stale and unoriginal but can instead be a sophisticated piece of work that positively reflects the competence of its composer to all who read it. Rather than dwell on picky, little "rules" that you must adhere to when writing, "Writing at Work" focuses on the real rules of grammar and aspects of style that you really need to know in order to write with confidence. Using examples realistically drawn from work settings, "Writing at Work" presents each topic in a manner that is at once accessible and inviting. Spread throughout the text are exercises that provide you with ample opportunity to write, revise, and correct the kinds of written tasks typically encountered at work. You can immediately gauge your progress by checking your work against the answers listed at the end of each chapter.