Category Archives: Writing

This weekend I was trying to participate in #storycraft while making dinner (dinner succeeded, my participation in the chat, not so much). The chat was about characterization, and one guy raised the old question about how do you write someone of the opposite gender. A couple of us pointed out that women are people too, which he didn’t seem to find a satisfactory response (he did get some more specific answers).

I suspect he was writing mainstream, because really, if you’ve got to worry about a few different alien/nonhuman species, men versus women aren’t all that tricky.

Gender stuff is one of the reasons I like to write secondary-world settings. I can declare that on planet x, there are no predefined gender roles. No endless parade of stories about the First Girl to do y. Just people. Perhaps this is cheating, but if I want sexism in my stories, I’ll read the newspaper, and I bet there are other readers who feel the same way.

For you other secondary-world writers, what real-world issues do you like to avoid, or address?

Recently I’ve been tackling the big stacks of paper and overflowing files in my office. Most of these have obvious homes, either preexisting for for me to create. The things that keep stumping me, though, are the interesting articles I clip from the newspaper or magazines that “might be useful for a story someday.” These are about things like historical science experiments or the Pony Express or ecosystems.

I dutifully file them away, and then forget I have them and never look at them again. This is not ideal.

I figure I have three options: stop clipping articles and assume that if I need the information the Internet will find it for me later, scan them into Evernote and tag them, or file them and keep an index on the computer where I can easily search them.

Option 1 requires that it occurs to me to look up the information and that I remember I have it (and I have gotten more ruthless about what I clip). Option 2 requires wrestling with our printer/scanner to make thing legible. Option 3 is sounding like the way to go (probably keeping the index in Evernote, and then this can be easily converted to option 2 at some future point when I have a spare month).

This is surely an already-solved problem. Any better ideas than Evernote?

A recent blog post at Writer Unboxed talks about how audience development is an important step for authors – even writers who aren’t yet published.

The author (Jane Friedman of Writer’s Digest) says writers (and aspiring writers) should:
* Interact with friends and other writers on a social network
* Develop relationships with writers and potential readers on Twitter
* Participate in forums that tie into your work’s genre, topic, or subject matter
* Comment on blogs
* Have a website or blog

I have some comments and questions at 9 and 60 Ways – please go there and let me know what you think.

I’m doing an unofficial Nanowrimo this year (I’m elizabeths over there). Since I’ve been rewriting last year’s Nano novel, I’ll continue with that.

Turning a zeroth draft into a first draft takes me a lot longer than writing the zeroth draft in the first place because my brain is a lot more involved in later drafts, so the chances that I’ll get 50k this month are pretty slim — I could just transcribe blindly, but that would be cheating myself since it’s a waste of time to not do the obvious edits (anything from fixing grammar to adding whole new scenes) as I come across them.

I’d at least like to get the entire second part typed up, and the holes in part one filled in, however many words that takes.

Back from a writer’s retreat with Merrie Haskell, Julie Winningham, and David Klecha, where we swam in the lake, played minigolf, and, yes, wrote. I wrote the story I’d developed a couple months ago (~2600 words; my short stories are short), which was exactly what I’d planned to do.

Listened to a zillion episodes of writing podcasts in the car, mostly several I Should Be Writing, two Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, my entire backlog of the creative writing podcast from AmericanWriters.com, and two Writers Talking.

Connie Willis had a great analogy on one of the ISBW’s. You hear people complaining about how difficult it is to find time to write. Others point out that you don’t find it, you make it. Willis said you carve it out of rock.