Monthly Archives: August 2013

WorldCon Checklist

I’m off to Worldcon tomorrow! I’m reading on Friday at 11. Stop in to listen and you may win a fabulous prize, since I’ll have a bunch of the Near+Far pendants with me. Right now I’m doing laundry and figuring … Continue reading

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On Writing: Creating Emotional Impact Through Characters

I’ve been teaching an advanced workshop that’s been a lot of fun. I gave them one of my favorite texts, an issue of Swamp Thing by Alan Moore called “Pog.” You might want to read it before proceeding on to the discussion of it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I picked that text because it has a high degree of emotional impact. It was a great starting point for talking about how to create that in a piece of fiction. In discussing how Moore achieved that, we realized that it is primarily constructed through the characters. While it’s nice to see the images, they are not the primary source of the impact.
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LonestarCon3 (Worldcon 2013) Schedule

I’m arriving Thursday evening, departing Monday afternoon. I did sign up for a Kaffeeklatsch but haven’t heard anything about that yet. I’m also planning on spending some time helping at the SFWA table. Reading: Cat Rambo (Reading) (Participant), Fri 11:00 … Continue reading

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Fanzo: So You Don’t Have to Watch Sports

So Wayne’s working for this new company, Fanzo, which provides a mobile app for sports fans so they can follow the latest social media news about their favorite teams on their phones. Which is swell for the sports fan, but … Continue reading

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Tips For Writers: Examining Your Own Writing Process

Unlike the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories class, we are not focusing on one of the basics each week, like characters, plot, or world building. Instead, I am trying to let the class drive itself where it can. My hope is that everyone, by the end of class, has not just been critiqued a couple of times, but has a better sense of their writerly process and how to make it more efficient, more confidence in finishing stuff and getting it sent out, and new ways of moving story from idea to finished draft.
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When Can You Get Away with Wordy Prose?

The following comes from an email exchange between myself and John Barnes, whose story I critiqued and who has given permission to reprint the exchange 🙂 I know that this question often comes up for newer writers. They see writers who write long, elaborate sentences and wonder why they then get criticized for overly long and complicated sentences.
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Upcoming: Building an Online Presence for Writers E-book

I’m putting together many of my notes from the Building an Online Presence for Writers class as well as the various blog posts I have done about online promotion and notes from the Near + Far book launch campaign in an e-book by the same name that I hope to release at the end of August, along with another e-book, Podcasting for Speculative Fiction Writers, written with Folly Blaine.
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