July, 2010
Wednesday Funny
Jul 28, 2010
Yeah, so it’s not alliterative, but frankly, don’t you need funny on Wednesday more than Friday?
Anyway, I should have more writing/revision-related posts soon, but in the meantime I wanted to pass this along to the rest of you. Tor posted a new SF advice column that is absolutely HILARIOUS. (Full disclosure: the writing and art are done by two friends of mine, so I MIGHT be biased… but I really don’t think I am.) I hope you’ll all go check it out, and if you like it, leave a comment there to that effect, to let Tor know it’s worth having again.
Tor.com — Word to the Wired: Personal Advice, Science Fiction Style
“Paranormalcy” ARC Giveaway Contest at LTWF
Jul 20, 2010
I rarely (i.e. never) pass along contests here, but given that most of you already read Let The Words Flow anyway, I don’t think it’ll be tooooo big an annoyance. 😉 And if you AREN’T reading LTWF, you should be!
Anyway, they’re having a giveaway of the ARC of PARANORMALCY, a book I’ve been dying to read ever since I heard
So without further ado, here’s the contest. Good luck!
Now I can die happy!
Jul 16, 2010
Today The Rejectionist passed along a seeeerious time-waster, but as it’s probably not quite as much of a time-waster as the Wordle thing, I figure it’s safe to pass it on to you guys. Basically, you paste in a chunk of text (as with Wordle) and the program analyzes it and compares it to a bunch of authors and figures out who you write like. It is the MOST ACCURATE thing I have EVER SEEN, because look:
Apparently, THE IRON WOOD could have been written by Margaret Atwood! And look at this, when I input text from this blog, I get:
(Note: Okay, so maybe my blog isn’t exactly H.P. Lovecraft. And maybe that means the first one is not exactly accurate either. No, scratch that. It is TOTALLY ACCURATE. *clings with deathgrip to comparison to Margaret Atwood.)
What sorts of writers do you guys get?
Correspondence from the Front: Revision update
Jul 15, 2010
I’ve gotten off to a rather rocky start with my revision process. I suppose it’s only fair, because when I started writing the first draft I got through the first 30,000 words of it almost without a hitch–it’s about time I hit some speed bumps. Part of the problem has come from outside the writing sphere–I got the mother of all migraines this past weekend, landing me in the ER for treatment and then unable to look at a computer screen for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time for a couple days. Mostly I’ve been rewriting the first chapter over and over, until I got to the point where I started feeling a bit like a broken record just skipping through the same words over and over again, stuck in that one groove.
Everything is better when it’s in rainbow!
Jul 07, 2010
I spent my weekend (and my birthday… and the two days since my birthday…) outlining my first draft of THE IRON WOOD. Granted, I have had some other things to do, like go out to dinner with my friends on my birthday, and attempt to go see the Tim Burton exhibit downtown today only to be turned away by the huuuuge line, and console ourselves with hot chocolate (such a terrible fate!). But mostly I have been outlining.
This is something I do not really do much of. I’ve always been a write-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person, and tend to rebel against outlining on principle. That said, I recently learned the post-it technique from my writing group back in the U.S., which is made up of Odyssey workshop grads. It was so helpful for the people who used it that I had to try it myself.
On kangaroos, markets, and Tim Tams.
Jul 03, 2010
It occurred to me this morning that while I’ve been talking endlessly about writing, my WIP, the publishing world, etc., I haven’t actually blogged yet about living in Australia, which is probably one of the more interesting things I could talk about. So here goes.
One of the reasons I haven’t really talked much about it is because for me, right now, it’s not all that different from living in the U.S. except that my family can’t turn up unexpectedly (which is both good and bad), and when I wake up in the morning there’s about a thousand unread tweets because most of the people I know live while I’m asleep (which is both good and bad). It’s winter here, which doesn’t mean much to those of us who are used to needing kitty litter, a ski lift, and a lot of hoping to get up our driveways in the winter. It doesn’t get that cold here, but it does get chilly, rainy, and windy, a combination which makes it rather unpleasant to be outside most days. So the weather is pretty conducive to huddling up indoors, and because I’ve been voluntarily huddling to finish my book, it’s been a pretty good arrangement.