I spent part of last week devouring the excellent new Cathrynne M. Valente novel, Deathless
Deathless
photo by Kristy Boyce
“The Color of Paradox”
The Color of Paradox
“The Cage”
The Cage
Author Archives: Alyx Dellamonica
Writing links, three bags full
My Spring 2011 Novel III class starts up next Wednesday and it’s about a fifty/fifty mix of students I’ve had in earlier classes and people I’ve never met before. It’ll be interesting to see what that’s like: half the projects will be new to me, and the others will be novels I’ve looked at quite closely.
One of the things I do with these classes is sift useful links from the flow of the Twitternets and other places and post them as guest lectures. Some are so valuable that I post them pretty much every time . . . which means they’ll be reruns for the folks who’ve taken my fall class.
I thought, for the sake of interest, I’d look at the links I considered postworthy last quarter. There’s a lot of them, and some were things I looked up as discussions progressed, so if it feels like the context is lacking, that’s why. There’s some interesting stuff here, and you all know a lot came up in the past quarter that could have gone on the list too, but this is what ended up hitting my classroom. Feel free to propose your faves in comments.
Workshopping
Scott Edelman – fifteen minute video, “How to Respond to a Critique of Your Writing”
Craft
Juliette Wade – Character-driven approach to kissing and sex scenes
Jay Lake – Producing Story
Kay Kenyon – The Mush Factor
Jon Sprunk – The Journey from Seedling to Bookshelf
Jane Friedman – You Hate Your Writing? That’s a Good Sign!
Sonya Chung – Writing Across Gender (This essay quotes the sex scene from BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, so maybe don’t read it at work.)
Chuck Wendig – Storytelling and the Art of Sadness
Three from Cat Rambo – Three strategies for snaring the senses, Five things to do in your first three paragraphs, and Why Titles Matter.
Nicola Griffith – Narrative Grammar – An Exercise
Suzannah Windsor Freeman – Seven Tasks to Bridge your First and Second Drafts
Joe McKinney – Rules for Writing about Cops
Revision and editing
Jan Winburn – How to Edit Your Way to a Can’t-Miss Story (be sure to check out the slide show.)
June Casagrande – More Parsing Larsson
Marketing Books / The Publishing Industry:
Query Shark Blog –
Anna Kashina – Interview with editor Peter Stampfel
Charlie Stross – How Books are Made
Christina Thompson – How to Write a Book in Ten Easy… Years?
J.E. Fishman – Twelve Common Miscperceptions about Book Publishing
Stina Leicht – On Agents
YA Fantasy Guide – Interview with Agent Sarah Megibow
Colleen Lindsay – Word counts for fiction, all kinds of fiction
The ever-changing state of self and e-pubbing:
John Scalzi – ePubbing Bingo Card
James Maxey – Pouring Cold Water on Kindle-ing
Eli James – The Very Rich Indie Writer
Tonya Plank – Meet Amanda Hocking
Book View Cafe
Turning Research into Narrative
Steve Pinker – Ten minute video on Language as a window into human nature
Yasmine Galenorn – Research Notebook from Hell
Life as a Writer
Finally, two from John Scalzi – “Writers have as much (financial) sense as chimps on crack“, and a tough love link on work habits.
Bridge over the River Staycation
I have been working on a few fiction projects at once these past few weeks: drafting one book, thinking about another, and poking away at a quartet of stories. I prefer to sink a little more deeply into one thing, but I have been playing around a lot these past couple of weeks, even with my fiction time.
(Fooling around at this point in my life seems to include playing with WordPress, which is how I ended up loading the new theme for my site. Very Indigo Springs / Blue Magic appropriate, I think! Well… blue, anyway.)
The reason for the playing around was that Kelly and I were loafing as much as was possible, because she’s changing to a new job and we don’t know yet–but will soon!–how it affects our vacation plans further down the road. And next week I am not doing the mentoring gig at all, though I am doing some other teaching and will still get up and write fiction, perhaps in a less random fashion.
That makes this the week where I catch up everything I neglected last week, and get ahead on everything I plan to neglect next. I knocked two big tasks off the mountain today, and hope to seriously dent another tomorrow.
Fooling around with the look again..
I know, I should help myself… but apparently I can’t. I wasn’t entirely happy with the theme I had going, so now I’m playing with another one.
Stench and swan
I have over the past few years become something of an artifical stench-hater, so it’s sad to report that I was at a work site this week and my coat fell afoul of a lurking puddle of disgustingly scented soap. I had thought it was just the heavy winter coat, but my fleece is redolent with it too. It smells like baby powder laced with decaying rose petals and I am quite thoroughly revolted by it. I plan to run the fleece through the washing machine ASAP and trot the heavy coat to the cleaners.
Until that happens, my short-term solution is to go outside in the hopes that fresh air will scrape off the stench cooties, or at least that the sights of spring will distract me from the miasma.
