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Monthly Archives: December 2012
Five Ways to Fall In Love on Planet Porcelain
Here’s my holiday gift to you. This story was original to the collection that came out in September, Near + Far. It’s one of my favorites. Here’s the print version as well as a link to the audio version, read by me and edited by the wonderful Lauren Harris.
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Posted in free fiction
Tagged five ways to fall in love on planet porcelain, near+far, podcasts
31 Comments
Writing Talk: Basics of Dialogue
Last week in the Writing F&SF Stories class, we talked about dialogue. This is a basic tool for a writer, one whose importance cannot be ignored.
Posted in Writing
Tagged dialogue, eavesdropping, writing advice, writing F&SF, writing good dialogue
1 Comment
Storytelling Games: Microscope
I’ve started tabletop playing again, although it’s via Google Hangouts rather than in person. My brother’s running a Changeling: The Lost campaign and it’s a great way to spend a little time with both him and my sister-in-law, along with meeting some new fellow players. I really love what he’s doing, which is using a system called Microscope in order to collaboratively generate the setting for the game, and it’s making me wonder about the possibilities of it for generating a shared world setting.
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Posted in Writing
Tagged changeling the lost, creating interesting plots, creativity, games, lowell francis, microscope, microscope game, storytelling
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Editing: How “Near” Was Arranged and Why
I blogged a couple of days ago about arranging stories and my philosophy for such arrangements. I wanted to show those principles in action by looking at the two ToCs for the book Near + Far.
As you may know, the book is divided into two parts, near future stories and far future stories. This allowed us to take advantage of the old Ace double format, where each half is one side of the book. It also meant creating two tables of contents, one for each section.
So here’s the order for the Near section, with some explication:
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Editing Anthologies and Collections: Arranging Stories
The always fabulous Jude Marie Green mailed me. Her question, which got me thinking, was: What does an editor do (besides acquire) to make the issue “come together”?
It wasn’t the first time this question’s come up, and I’ve never seen much about it, so I wanted to talk a little about the idea of arranging things. Because an ideal magazine issue or anthology isn’t just a bunch of stories in a box. In theory, at least, the editor has selected stories that resonate with each other and arranged them in a way that’s meaningful. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
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The Inevitable Awards Post
It’s that time of year when people are stepping up their reading for the various awards and their best of the year lists. I’m making my own, and if you’ve got something I should be paying attention to, please feel free to point me to it in the comments here or mail it to me.
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Review: The Red Knight By Miles Cameron
In the past I’ve found the promotional bag of books from a con can vary widely in terms of quality. One treasure that emerged from my World Fantasy Convention bag, though, is THE RED KNIGHT by Miles Cameron. I’m about to send my copy off to a friend, and I thought I’d recommend it to other folks as well.
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