Some recommended reading for you, from other places on the interwebs. A narrative will attempt to move the reader from one state to another. There’s a question of acceleration with word length: a short story must take off very quickly and land with great precision, while a novel can take its time lifting off and […]
So, let me clear: if you are a fan of Warren Ellis work in any way, and you have not subscribed to his email newsletter, you should fucking remedy that right fucking now. If you are a fan of smart creators doing smart things with networking tools, you should also fucking remedy that right now. […]
I’ve been reading my way through David Madden’s Revising Fiction, which is rapidly proving to be one of the best investments I’ve made in the last few years. I keep stumbling over things that explain the minutia of writing incredibly well. Case in point. Your reader expects to see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Bald statements do […]
One of the nice things about being forced to spend time on Tumbr by the website outage is actually reading some of the tumblr’s I only visit intermittently under normal circumstances. Mostly, it’s the comic-book people. The best part was discovering this post from comics writer Matt Fratction about craft and intent and the decision […]
Started re-reading Jeff VanderMeer Wonderbook this week. Find myself coming back to this paragraph, over and over, as I start typing up the novel I wrote in the lead-up to GenreCon: In theory, the process of revision is very simple. As David Madden writes in his brilliant book Revising Fiction, revision means asking questions about each chapter, […]
I spent yesterday working my way through the Every Frame a Painting series on youtube, courtesy of a recommendation from my friend Jess. If you’re interested in cinema, this is one of those things worth subscribing too – Tony Zhou pulls apart the technical aspects of film-making in terms of shot composition and editing, and […]
This is a heads up for anyone who doesn’t ordinarily follow Galactic Suburbia: the November 23 episode is well worth making the time to listen to. Alisa Krasnostein’s explanation of her feelings about the recent World Fantasy Award changes are worth it on its own, but the section where she explains the things she’s learned […]
With a hat-tip to Jonathan Strahan,who shared this link on Facebook, the Nerds of a Feather blog series where they’re interviewing cyberpunk authors about the current state of SF is awesome, particularly the section where the interview Bruce Sterling: It’s true that the mid list has dwindled and more money and attention goes to fewer […]
Many years ago, I heard a renowned magazine editor Gardner Dozois remark, “I don’t want just a great story in my magazine, I want a great writer in my stable.” He was talking of course about why he didn’t pick up new writers on their very first stories. He had a policy: if a new […]
Odds are, if you’re interested in writing, you’re already reading Chuck Wendig’s blog regularly. If you’re not…well, fuck, I don’t know, start. In fact, start today, ’cause his most recent guest-post by Delilah S. Dawson is brilliant and includes a point that could be a personal mantra at the day-job and my writing life in general: […]
Romance Rocks, the 2014 Romance Writers of Australia Conference, is taking place in Sydney this weekend. Under better circumstances I would be down there, but the new mortgage put a pin in that plan earlier this year. This makes me sad. Last year, the RWA conference was the best event I attended as a writer, and […]
Two hours of writing time this morning. In my head, this usually equates to about 1,000 words of writing. In practice, it resulted in 498 new words on Frost, which is not a rate that will get things done by the time they need to be done. Only 29,232 words left to write. # Weird day […]
