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Monthly Archives: April 2013
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.
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Posted in Writing
Tagged advanced techniques, jeff vandermeer, junot diaz, stephen king, worm within, writing F&SF
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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.
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Posted in blogging
Tagged anne finch, deborah copaken kogan, diversity, granta, night shade books, tin house, vida
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Posted in SFWA
Tagged clusterfucks, jason williams, jeremy lassen, joshua bilmes, kameron hurley, michael stackpole, night shade books, SFWA
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Maunderings About Rewriting a Novel
If you’re friend or family, you may know something about it, or even have read one of the many, many earlier drafts.
And I’m really happy with it, but holy cow, is it hard to rewrite a novel. Because you’ve got to manage it all in your head while working with smaller parts of it.
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Posted in Writing
Tagged moon's accomplice, rewriting novels, Tabat, the moon's accomplice, writing F&SF, writing novels
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