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Recent Posts
- WIP – A Story of the Rose Kingdom
You cannot smell the roses in the hours before dawn. It is only when sunlight touches the vast blossoms, each as large as a human head, that crowd the tallest branches of the Hedge, that the petals loosen. The perfume seeps out into the air then, first as a hint of sweetness, then stronger.
By midmorning, the smell is so intoxicating that approaching enemies lay down their arms and sit, staring into the air, nostrils flared, breathing, smelling. It grows heavier and heavier throughout all the day, and only begins to ebb when the sun completely slips below the ocean horizon to the west. The Hedge borders the Rose Kingdom on three sides, and on the west is that blue line.
Continue reading → - Writing at the Next Level: Getting Inside Your Character’s Head
Once you’ve mastered the basics of getting words on a page and moving characters around through situations, there’s some things that (in my experience) the majority of writers need to focus on. Examples are narrative grammar, paragraphing strategies, trimming excess from sentences, and getting inside a character’s head. Here, I’m going to discuss the last of those.
A lot of this is taken from correspondance with my student Hasnain. He’d asked about story structures, particularly Freitag’s Triangle, and we’d discussed where the triangle occurs in Junot Diaz’s story, Fiesta 1980. In looking at his most recent story, I’d said I thought he needed to get inside his main character’s head more.
Continue reading → - Giveaway: Near + Far Hardcover Edition, Plus Three Pieces of Jewelry
Huzzah! There’s now a hardcover edition of Near + Far, including a spiffy dust jacket designed by Tod McCoy.
Continue reading → - Recent Writing/Publishing Related Links, 4/11/2013
On some other boards I frequent, the question of how to make a publication more diverse has been coming up. Here’s a couple of pieces related to that. The editors of Tin House and Granta discuss how they worked to make their publications more diverse. Anne Finch talks about similar editorial practices. For a breakdown of what the gender ratio was of book reviewers and books reviewed, see the 2012 VIDA count.
Continue reading → - Addendum to Night Shade
I blogged about Nightshade last week, and since then there’s been a number of developments, including modification of the contracts that were so crappy. Authors should be feeling a little happier, at least.
But, I wanted to point to another group that’s involved in this and which is getting worse treatment than the authors, which is the production crew.
Continue reading → - What I’m Currently Working On
The rewrite of the first book, whose tentative working title is Beasts of Tabat, is off to Seth the fabulous agent, so I’ve started messing with the second book. It’s got the love triangle I mentioned in an earlier post, and I’m contemplating the somewhat odd strategy of having it start, chronologically, at a time point somewhere in the middle of the first book, and show some of that action from a different viewpoint. Crazy? Maybe, but I think it’ll be interesting to try.
Continue reading → - Literary Techniques in Speculative Fiction Workshop
I’ve got a Lit Techniques in Speculative Fiction workshop coming up on Sunday and wanted to mention it to people. What do we do? We talk about literary devices and how and when to use them. We look at examples. … Continue reading →
- Night Shade Books: Clusterfuck and a Half
So, much of the Internet’s time, at leaast on the spec-fic side of things, was taken up this week by recent convulsions surrounding Night Shade Books. Here’s a brief recap of a situation that is much more complicated than I’m making it out to be.
Continue reading →
- WIP – A Story of the Rose Kingdom
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