Ableism? Maybe…

Mpepper/ April 28, 2021/ Think Pieces

I recently was made aware of a publishing conversation that occurred on Twitter last month. (I know, I’m so out of the loop.) It was about ableism in publishing and there not being space for neurodivergent (ND) authors. I don’t know if that’s true; I’ve never really thought about it until now, when it was brought to my attention. I

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Not a Failure

Mpepper/ March 8, 2021/ Think Pieces

I recently decided to move ahead with self-publishing The Ghosts of Marshley Park. And almost immediately was met by two differing responses online: people cheering me on and people who wished me well in a way that absolutely suggested the passive-aggressive tone of, “You weren’t good enough for ‘real’ publishing, eh?” To be fair, tone is super difficult to discern

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Writers as Competition?

Mpepper/ January 29, 2021/ Think Pieces, Writing Advice

I came late to Twitter’s “Harsh Writing Advice” trend, but apparently someone posted that other writers are your competition, and then got slammed, and then deleted the tweet, but of course (because Internet) it’s still around in various formats. People piled on this guy for posting this, and… given that he didn’t really explain his logic (if there was any),

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It’s Complicated

Mpepper/ December 7, 2020/ Think Pieces

The publishing world is a complicated place. More so now than ever, really. It used to be relatively straightforward: you wrote a book, you submitted it to agents, they said yes or no, and if they said yes, they submitted the book to publishers who would also say yes or no. For some publishers, it was possible to skip the

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