Friday Ephemera, 9/23/11 Edition

 Friday Ephemera  14 Responses »
Sep 232011
 

 

I have been reading Goliath by Scott Westerfeld (BRILLIANT) and outlining all week, so I haven’t been doing a lot of online stuff. This week’s Friday Ephemera is pretty sad.

TELL GREAT STORIES
  • Next week is Banned Book Week and I’m going to be pulling out all the emotional heart strings for this one. I’m going to be attacking the challengers of “dark YA” and also telling you some about me growing up. I’m kind of afraid because it is the most personal I’ve ever been online, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
  • If you haven’t yet signed up for MonsterFest, do now! Go! And tell people about it. I actually have quite a few sign ups. I’m going to post the schedule next week of those who have already signed up. There are some GREAT monsters being covered.

 

Writing
  • YA Highway has a post this week about Ghostwriting. Not the kind with actual ghosts. The kind where you don’t get credit.
  • Author Claudia Gray guested on The Other Side of the Story to talk about first person vs. third person writing.
  • Last week C.A. Marshall wrote 8 Reasons Why I Hate Your Book, which sounds heart wrenching when she puts it that way, but there are some really good reasons for hating a book in this list. #5, coincidences, is one of my BIG BIG HATE LIST ARGH items. I don’t scream, “OH MY GOD THAT WAS A TERRIBLE COINCIDENCE” though. I usually scream, “OH MY GOD THAT WAS SO CONTRIVED I’M KIND OF EMBARRASSED.” I do sort of use all caps in real life when things annoy me.
  • George R.R. Martin on killing off characters.

 

On Writing…but Not

 

Reading

 

Our Weird World
  • i09 reports on a hidden painting between a 19th century masterpiece.
  • Electron Boy passed away last weekend and everyone in the world mourned him. Do you remember Electron Boy? The Make-A-Wish foundation made his wish come true to be a superhero for a day. And oh boy did they make his dreams come true, and the dreams of everyone in the world. I can’t even think about this story without crying my eyes out.

 

Blogfests

Margo Lerwill is hosting the I AM LEGEND blogfest next September 29th. From her blog

On September 29, 2011, stand up to say I AM LEGEND and tell us why. One of the participants will win either a copy of Donald Maass’s The Fire in Fiction or a hardcover edition of George R. R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons, winner’s choice. The winner will be picked at random and announced here on Friday, September 30th, 2011.

Claudie is hosting the Superheroes of Science blogfest all next week! I love her science posts, so I’m pretty excited about this one. Claudie has a new site she’s moving her blog over to, and this is the official kick off blogfest to celebrate. So help her celebrate! From her blog:

The blogfest takes place between Sept 25th and Sept 30th, on my new digs and your respective blogs. You can participate by answering to one of the prompts below (or anything related) and adding your name to Linky below.

There is a secret prize! At the end of the blogfest, I will use my awesome dice to pick the winner from participants.

 

 Deana Barnhart is doing a Killer Characters blogfest later in October, but you can sign up now. And of course there are prizes! From her blog:

Join us in three challenges:
1) Oct 24 post about your favorite literary supporting character
2) Oct 26 post about your favorite literary protagonist
3) Oct 28 post about your favorite literary antagonist
All entires should be 250 words maximum, but you may use all the pictures you’d like.

Friday Ephemera, 9/9/11 Edition

 Friday Ephemera, Topics in Writing  10 Responses »
Sep 092011
 
On Writing
On Writing…but Not
  • Author Courtney Summers reveals the cover for her upcoming zombie book THIS IS NOT A TEST. Not gonna lie, it kind of freaks me out.
  • Daniel Arenson guest posts on Amanda Hawking’s blog  and talks about the top ten toughest creepy creatures.
  • This is a great follow up post to my Dystopian week – EM Bowman writes: Is it Dystopian? A Flowchart for Decoding the Genre. Not as cool as Venn Diagrams, but you know, very nearly.
  • Empty White Pages (Campaigner shout out!) posted Musical Stories: Horror - creepy, creepy, creepy songs, especially the first one that has that pretty music and serial killer lyrics. She has a whole series of posts like these, including YA.
Publishing
Social Networking Gossip
Contests!
  • Author Kody Keplinger (THE DUFF) has a new book out now: Shut Out and she’s running a cool contest over at YA Highway. Check it out!
  • Steph Su is giving away a copy of Hooked by Catherine Greenman
  • The Story Siren has a copy of The Witchlander by Lena Coakley up for grabs :-)
Good for the Soul
  • Authors Nathan Bransford, James Dashner, and J. Scott Savage have a new podcast called Wordplay! It’s quite good. :-)

 

 

Don’t forget to come back on Monday and get the low-down on my next blogfest – MONSTERFEST 2011!

 

Friday Ephemera, 8/26/11 Edition

 Friday Ephemera  12 Responses »
Aug 262011
 
BOOKS OUT THIS WEEK I’M IN LOVE WITH

Jackson Pearce’s book SWEETLY was released this week! I can’t wait to read this! The cover is gorgeous and I loved Sisters Red.

 

 

This Dark Endeavor: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein by Kenneth Oppel – Oh how excited I’ve been for this book to finally come out! Like Sweetly, I’ll be buying this in hardback because I just really love this cover.

 

 

Writing
Publishing
  • Ewan Morrison wrote an article for The Guardian which is so bleak you might want to get a pint of ice cream out before you even begin reading. I think this article is the far edge of publishing apocalyptia and is probably more like an “absolute worst case scenario” than “Absolute Truth.”
  • Dear Author responded with a similar “Whoa, pump the breaks, Ewan” reaction that I had when I read it.
  • The Rejectionist had a pretty strong reaction to this article in the NYT that talks about how the reason boys aren’t reading anymore is because there are too many girls involved and I don’t know about you but this article makes me feel oh-so-slightly-homicidal.
  • One of my favorite YA writers, Courtney Summers, just announced her next book will come out sometime around June of 2012. It is called THIS IS NOT A TEST. And dude, it’s about zombies.

It’s the end of the world. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won’t stop pounding on the doors. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self. To Sloane Price, that doesn’t sound so bad. Six months ago, her world collapsed and since then, she’s failed to find a reason to keep going. Now seems like the perfect time to give up.

As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she’s forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually want to live. But as the days crawl by, everyone’s motivations to survive begin to change in startling ways and soon the group’s fate is determined less and less by what’s happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life–and death–inside.

When everything is gone, what do you hold on to?

Contests!
  • YA Highway is having a First Lines Contest. Up for grabs are 6 ARCs, including The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer and Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi. I WANT THIS SO MUCH.
  • Lydia Kang is hosting a 900 followers contest. As a blogger rolling up on 200 followers, I just sort of can’t imagine having that many awesome people within arms reach.
  • Lisa McMann has some prize pack contests going on
Holy Crap Our World is Awesome
Wicked & Tricksy
 Things You Should Join

(Because they are good for the soul)

Alex J. Cavanaugh is like, the master of blogfests and community ideas, and he came up with one that I am so in love with. I think all of us can benefit from getting involved in his Insecure Writer’s Support Group.  From his blog:

“Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!”

The first post date is Wednesday, September 7th. For more info and to sign up, go here.

————————

Have you signed up for the Writers’ Platform-Building Campaign yet? Honestly, I don’t know how you’ve held out this long if you haven’t. But you’ve only got a couple of days left to give in, so you might as well make today the day :-) See you there!

Awards

I am terrible, terrible, terrible about posting about awards I am given for my blog. I have a couple to post about not next week but the week after, so for those of you who gave them to me, THANK YOU SO MUCH I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN YOU. I just plan several weeks of posts in advance and then have trouble adapting when something like a cool blog award comes up. Since next week is Hot Dystopian Summer Nights, I’ll update my awards the following week. Thank you again, I love you all! 

 

 

NaNoWriMo Cookies: Day 25′s 10 Rules for Writing Fiction- Advice from authors who know what you’re going through

 Fantastic Authors, NaNoWriMo 2010, Tools and Resources  No Responses »
Nov 252010
 

Day 25.

Before the panic of the final five days sets in, I want you to stop what you are doing right now and click on this link. Do it. Go now.

When you have returned from clicking you will have read 10 Rules for Writing Fiction (and possibly clicked on Part 2 and read that as well.) And you probably feel a lot better than you did before you clicked on the link. You really ought to listen to me more often.

I love all of these 10 Rules because they are kind and honest and true and, in general, writers tend to be exceedingly unkind and dishonest and untrue to themselves. We waffle between thinking we are failures and cannot do what we have set out to do and in thinking that we are the most brilliant geniuses of creativity that was ever set upon this earth to write and dream. Both are horrible lies we tell ourselves to push ourselves to keep going and to desperately try to convince ourselves to stop.

I originally found this article because of my unabashed love for Margaret Atwood. She is my favorite author Of All Time and I think probably the most brilliant woman in the world. If you have not had the chance to fall in love with her, pick up a copy of the tiny book Good Bones and Simple Murders. It will change the way you see storytelling forever.

The writers included in the article are: Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, Al Kennedy, Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Ramkin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Toibin, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson

Margaret Atwood

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6 Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9 Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10 Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

NaNoWriMo Cookies: Day 24 and a really useful writing tip from Cory Doctorow

 Fantastic Authors, NaNoWriMo 2010, Research, Tools and Resources  No Responses »
Nov 242010
 

Day 24.

Today’s cookie is quite possibly one of the most helpful ideas I’ve ever stumbled across, and it doesn’t just apply to NaNoWriMo writing. I was doing research on research (don’t ask, I’m so easily pulled into mindless deep research dives. All I need is a website waving around something shiny and I’m all but lost) when I came across this tip from author Cory Doctorow as posted on Lifehacker.com. I’m not surprised it came from him. He’s kind of amazing and definitely one of my heroes.

Researching isn’t writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don’t. Don’t give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction – an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type “TK” where your fact should go, as in “The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite.” “TK” appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is “Atkins”) so a quick search through your document for “TK” will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention. – Cory Doctorow

NaNoWriMo Cookies: Day 11 and Jackson Pearce on Faking It

 Fantastic Authors, NaNoWriMo 2010, Topics in Writing, Writing  1 Response »
Nov 112010
 

Day 11!!!!

Almost halfway there!

Here’s a video by the awesome author Jackson Pearce about “faking it.” As in, padding your word count just to get to 50,000 instead of concentrating on positive writing skills and being a better writer. This is very, very good advice for any writer, not just NaNoWriMo writers.