Smart Advice from Smart People
International Women’s Day, Redux
Right, so, by this point everyone’s more-or-less seen this, but for the small percentage of you who haven’t:
PeterMBall
08/03/2011
Category: Smart Advice from Smart People
Smart Advice from Smart People
Nancy Kress on Fixing the Ending
Nancy Kress recently did a short post on how she fixed a story ending that wasn’t working, although it sneaks in as part of a post about other things. The short version, for those not inclined to follow links, goes something like this: Step One: go back to the last point where the story last excited you. Step Two: Change the action of a secondary character. Step Three: Chart the protagonists response to that change. I may have sat there staring at the advice for a good ten minutes this morning, wondering how the hell I’d never thought of it. I mean, it’s simple and rather obvious, but seeing it articulated like that as a process is somewhat revelatory.
PeterMBall
21/01/2011
Smart Advice from Smart People
Steve Almond on getting paid in Karma over @ the Coachella Review
Apparently there really isn’t a point in a writing career where you get to stop having this conversation. I find this vaguely depressing.
PeterMBall
31/03/2010
Smart Advice from Smart People
Cyborg
Scientists in Korea transmit data along a human arm at broadband speeds. Electrodes were placed on the arm about ten inches apart and they transmitted data at ten magabits per second. As a child of the eighties this kind of thing blows my mind, especially given the large majority of the formative movies from my childhood dealt with the relationship between man and technology, and I kind of miss it. Especially cyborgs. SF seems to have moved away from the cyborg towards post-humanism as a means of exploring this issue, which makes a kind of sense, but the whole man/meat merging will always be my first love.
PeterMBall
17/03/2010
Smart Advice from Smart People
Holden Caulfield is not Edward Cullen
It seemed a good day to revisit these videos: Way more fun than any academic discussion of the Catcher in the Rye I’ve ever had.
PeterMBall
29/01/2010
Smart Advice from Smart People
Mystery Boxes
Over the years I’ve gradually noticed that the people whose creative output fascinates me the least are often the most interesting to listen to when they discuss their creative process. Today I found myself losing twenty-minutes listening to JJ Abrams talk about the role of mystery in narrative and the process. Of course, by my earlier logic, one of these days we’re going to discover that Ewe Boll is a genius.
PeterMBall
25/09/2009
Smart Advice from Smart People
For those who will find it interesting…
Nancy Kress on writing a paragraph, which proves a nice glimpse of work-process-in-action.
PeterMBall
24/04/2009
Smart Advice from Smart People
Thursday Linkfest
Another week where the list is far less complete than I’d like, but such is life these days… Okay, did you know Angela Slatter has a blog now? No? Well, now you do. Do yourself a favour and go read it, for Angela is a phenomenal writer and a sayer of useful things – I recommend starting with her posts on dialogue or the Clarion South experience. So Friday of last week I put forth some ideas about SF and Gender in response to debates that’ve raged across the Australian SF community of late. Most of the discussion seemed to occur over in the comments of my livejournal, but it also spawned a response from Ben Payne (which generates some interesting discussion on its own). Scienceagogo on Biodeversity Regions as Hotspots for War (Courtesy of Chris Green) Chris Green takes my standard screed on the awesomeness of being rejected and turns it into a yearly writing goal. The Conjecture website has been updates after
PeterMBall
05/03/2009
Smart Advice from Smart People
Thursday Linkfest
Over-tired, very busy, and generally lazy this week. This is not so much a weeks worth of interesting links (which I’ve started doing as I go along) as stuff I remembered with half-hearted accuracy sometime this morning. Via the ever-entertaining villainous_mog – photographs of Japanese Factories at night (as VM puts it: they look straight out of Final Fantasy 7.) Tansy Raynor Roberts on writing time, with much on the notion of draft-speed. Clarion peep Ben Francisco has posted his latest article at Fantasy, grading last years big comic-book company crossovers. (In the interest of self-confession, I must admit that my primary response was “thank god I don’t read comics” anymore, even though that’s something of a misnomer – it was big crossovers that drove me towards the discreet stories of the graphic-novel format). Speaking of Clarion Peeps, both Lyn Battersby and Daniel Braum have posted their thoughts on the 2007 experience at tutor Lee Battersby’s blog. Kate Eltham has
PeterMBall
19/02/2009
Smart Advice from Smart People
Thursday Linkfest
To kick it off, some members of WA fandom are putting to together a fanzine, Hope, to raise funds for the Bushfire victims in Victoria. A bunch of talented folks have already volunteered work, so much so that there will now be more than one issue. Worth keeping an eye on, all up. With all the doom and gloom surrounding small press publishing, there is at least a glimmer of hope that the recently deceased Realms of Fantasy may come back courtesy of a buy-out of the magazine/brand. Until then, a farewell by the RoF Sushmaster that includes a list of the accepted stories we won’t get a chance to see (With commiserations to my friend Ben Francisco, who unfortunately has a very fine story caught on that list). Something Positive on the tendency among American reviewers to associate the stop-motion film Coraline with Tim Burton. Speaking of webcomics, XKCD addresses an issue that does actually bother me. My old friend Villainous_mog, now
PeterMBall
12/02/2009
Smart Advice from Smart People
Thursday Linkfest
Jay Lake says sensible things about writers and psychotic dedication. ASIF has posted their recommended reading list for 2008, with much love thrown in the direction of the ever-awesome Angela Slatter. The 2007 Clarion Blog Nostalgia Extravaganza continues over at Lee Battersby’s site, with entries by clarion peeps Michael Greenhut and Helen Venn. A photo-series on dead Asian themeparks. (snurched from Elizabeth Bear’s livejournal). Gen Con Australia and my former/sometimes current boss Hooly talks candidly about the 2009 convention (I am, for the record, involved in the con this year, but at a greatly reduced capacity – hence he’s only an intermittent boss these days) If you’re in Brisbane and an aspiring writer-type trying to figure out what happens next, I’d recommend signing up for Marianne de Pierres workshop at Sunnybank library. It’s free and I can say from experience that Marianne’s workshops tend to be both informative and eye-opening. And for the more artistic types – Small Beer Press is holding
PeterMBall
05/02/2009
Smart Advice from Smart People
Thursday Linkfest
Yesterday was busy and thus thesis-less, plus I got very little sleep thanks to some very unfomfortable shoulder pain, so odds are I’ll be saying little of interest today. Instead, I’ll entertain you with links to stuff that I’ve found interesting over the last week (or so): My good friend Chris Slee reflects on the Edisonade (aka the pre-history of Science Fiction) and what was the best thing *before* sliced bread. The ever-stylish Ben Francisco cherry-picks the SFnal highlights of the authors@google youtube series and gathers them together in a single handy post (although he’s missing Neil Gaiman in the line-up). If you’ve not seen these, particularly the John Scalzi, I recommend going and taking a look. The Aurealis Awards are announced and the results posted on their website. Cat Sparks has posted photographs of the night, in which a bunch of writer-types have scrubbed up pretty well (and I show up looking marginally less shabby than usual in the vast flicker
PeterMBall
29/01/2009
