There are days where I think everything is going fantastically and I believe that I am the greatest writer in the world, and then there are days where I am convinced that no one will ever "get" what it is I'm trying to say and then I start worrying about...well, everything...

I realize that this is a problem and I really should be focusing on the writing... (In fact, what am I doing here?? I should be writing!)

I would think, though, that someone writing something "in vogue" would find it easier to find a publisher/agent, whereas someone writing a thriller might be told "no one reads these secret society things anymore".

My current work is very urban fantasy, and while there are some original elements it's not the sort of thing that people would think is super duper original (nothing new under the sun and all that) although I like my characters and the plot seems to be going as it should. But, as you've mentioned, the urban fantasy trend has now given way to Hunger Games type books and I'm slightly worried by that as it probably means that agents aren't actively looking for something UF

Some people have told me it helps if you have some sort of "fan base" before you publish, as this will interest publishers/agents marketing-wise, which was why I was thinking about author websites, and whether or not I should start one (even though as an unpublished writer I really don't have that much to say, either on the writing front, or on the publishing front. I could speak for hours about my characters, but as the book isn't published yet, details about my characters are unlikely to interest anyone)

I meant current in terms of reader trend, not in terms of content. For example, a few years back there was that big Dan Brown Da Vinci Code phase where everyone was buying thriller type books, and now the trend has moved on to things like paranormal romance and urban fantasy. I'm just worried that something paranormal romance I write right now will be buried among the future, say, high fantasy trend.

I certainly wasn't the biggest fan of self-publishing a few years ago, because I'd seen too many vanity writers (you've all met them. They're the people who write something terrible and think it's great because their mom and grandma and auntie have told them it's great, and then they go and self-publish it and try to sell you the stuff...) who used self-publishing as a sort of "woe is me, no one understands my art" shield. I think however that self-publishing is garnering more respect and attracting a much better class of writer these days, so I've been looking into it as an option.

The main thing is to really just write something that's worth reading, I guess

I recently found the blog of a self-published author who had sold maybe a couple hundred copies of her novel. She was posting things about "how to write a bestselling novel" and "how REAL writers write" and it just turned me off. Good advice is always good advice, but selling 200 books does not make anyone a bestselling writer by anyone's standards and they shouldn't say they are.

It's things like that that make me very wary of posting writing related stuff on a blog. I don't want to come off sounding very arrogant (especially as I haven't published anything yet).

I would like to see my stuff published by a traditional publisher, but I think it usually takes about six months to a year to find an agent/publisher (and I'm being optimistic here and then maybe another year to actually see the book in stores after all the paperwork is signed (and still being optimistic here.... I don't know if my work would still be "current" after that long.

I think it's just that when someone we like dies in a book, we want it to mean something, and not just be pointless ("Oh, by the way, the guy you like just died. Deal with it. Haha."). Trying to give a death meaning by being "profound" or "moralizing" just makes it worse in a way.

I'm worried that a lot of fantasy sagas with the "someone important will DIE in the last book!!!!!" plotlines are making some writers think that they somehow HAVE to kill someone at the end of the book to prove something, and then they're left wondering what to do with the rest of the book, so they might as well add some profound bits to round it all off....

For some strange reason it sounds very Douglas Adams to me. 

One of the nicer things about writing space opera is that I can handwave about antimatter a lot rather than having to google the sorts of subjects that might arouse suspicion in officers of the law.

It does get a bit awkward when you start asking friends if they know how to build a bomb, and then get that loooong silence on the other end of the phone....

I think maybe I will have to go the Burn Notice route of telling people how to build a bomb without actually teaching them how to make a bomb after all.

If anyone out there is monitoring my browser history, I'm probably heading some FBI most wanted list right now...