#PennedPossibilities 323 — What's a piece of advice for writers that you listened to and are glad for?
An Australian author, Lucy Sussex, told us at Clarion West 1998 to be shameless in promoting ourselves. Being a shy person, networking and promotion has been a heavy lift, but I'm working on it and I know it's going to help. Mastodon: ☑️
#PennedPossibilities 322 — What piece of advice, as an author, did you once receive but hadn’t followed? Looking back on it now, you might wish that you had.
Advice: Don't only write novels. Write lots of shorter pieces.
When I started I saw that you could only make a living if you sold novels, so I wrote novels. That completely discounted the fabulous practice you get completing lots of smaller stories. Completing a novel takes lots of time and there's a mounting anxiety that in the end the plot will fail or no publisher will be interested. Yeah, true with short fiction, but the investment is far lower (or should be if you're doing it right). There used to be lots of magazines you could sell short fiction to... for pennies a word, but it was something, and it offered a chance to build a brand name and a following. Such notoriety could help you sell novels, too.
Someone is either selling pirated copies of my book, or they're trying to scam people using my name and book. They even uploaded it under the name "River Hopkins" instead of "River J. Hopkins."
Can y'all please report the seller? This is the link. They're selling it for $14.99, and there's absolutely no way they have new copies for that price.
#WordWeavers 2405.19 — How did you settle on your MC’s appearance?
Historically, I wrote my characters such that I found them attractive. I don't do that anymore.
Sometimes I don't have control, except for hair styles and clothes, or the lack thereof. The story or character may have certain in-the-moment requirement, like when the MC needed to train in an almost all-male fight gym as a prizefighter (she'd later win a championship). Of course she had tailored pink and black gym wear made of technical fabric that outlined every curve—which proved interesting.
These days I do the best not to assign an appearance at all, instead keeping things vague and sticking to describing only what's absolutely necessary. My experiences with publishers is that'll they'll ignore your descriptions for cover art and promotion anyway. In any case, doing this allows the reader to imagine someone they would find attractive(†). The MC in the current WiP is described physically only as tall, shy, so beautiful that both sexes fall for her, and that she has "winter eyes," whatever that is. In the other story, the only thing I'm settled on is described by the devil-girl something like this:
"Take two finger length pieces of rusty rebar, sharpen one end, bend it ninety degree, and stick one above each temple, pointing backwards. Makes wearing hats problematic. Yeah. Gets messy when they try to grab you by the head in a fight, especially if it sticks in..."
She's also describes her very olive complexion; she's mentioned green eyes in a mirror and red hair everywhere. It could easily change in revision.
(†) A recent writer's prompt asked about my target audience. Can I say "imaginative?"
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9 Nbr 18 — Have you written sections where the action occurs against the clock? How did you do it?
My current story segment in serialization takes place over a very short time period, after the last third of the previous story taking place between dusk and dawn. The other story I am working on is a three act story, each act taking place over very few hours.
Writing stories in compressed time isn't much different than writing stories that take place more episodically over longer periods of time. In both cases, I write about what is important for the character and how they deal with events. An example may help.
In the serialization (obviously spoilers if you know which story I'm referring to), the MC realizes that though the leader has left on a military adventure to handle a "guerrilla insurgency," she sees evidence that same foe may attack the capital city. In theory, she's politically second in command. In practice, she has no real power. How she spends that day scheming and conniving with only a title to get a single frigate on patrol drives the story and the clock. It starts with a PTSD episode where she realizes she may be responsible again for innumerable deaths without the power to prevent them, then her working every contact she knows, butting heads with the generals who discount her experience running a crime syndicate (briefly), convincing a discriminated against officer who wants to accept discharge to instead command a museum-piece frigate, getting into a bloody fight with the XO, avoiding what the reader will see as assassination attempts, and it just gets worse with her love interests (plural!) pulling at her heart.
All in 12 hours. Tick-tock! That's one day of three days of escalating existential threats. The fourth day's events take place over one hour, which is about the time it would take to read.
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9 Nbr 12 — When does AI cross the line between helpful tool and problematic tech for writing and publishing? CW: Some sarcasm and cynicism.
When? That happened a few years ago. All over the web. Whether you realize it or not, writers are being supplanted in most all minor writing jobs on lots of lesser and not so minor websites. Have you noticed that some stories are circular, seem to be written by authors of questionable fluency, miss a glaring argument or get a fact wrong, and in the end really make no good points or teach you anything? They seem to regurgitate what you've seen elsewhere?
Yep. AI written.
AI's a free tool! Managers love free. Let those freelancers go; just write some good prompts. So many good articles (likely AI written) to teach you how! All we need is good clickbait headlines, anyway. Feed the search engines! Serve up those display ads nobody clicks. Get us those micro-cents per page view.
Riiiight.
Sheesh. This Rubicon... Has... Been crossed. Mostly. Some have tripped. Many have drowned.
What I'd really like is for AI enhanced software to notice little things like misusing led and lead, finding missing words, pointing out when I leave out the 'nt in wouldn't changing the meaning of everything I wrote, even capitalizing based on context when dictating... thus and such. Yeah. Too difficult.
I won't repeat what everyone else is saying. Yep. True all that. It's all wrong headed at the moment and if you don't know how to write OR you could do it yourself if you weren't soooo lazy, #AI's just going to make you into a fool.
You get to make yourself into a fool in front of a publisher only once.
I love sharing some of my author friends with y'all. Check out Geoff Habiger & Coy Kisee
Fantasy, Paranormal
The writing duo of Geoff Habiger and Coy Kissee have been life-long friends since high school in Manhattan, Kansas. (Affectionately known as the Little Apple, which was a much better place to grow up than the Big Apple, in our humble opinion.) We love reading, baseball, cats, role-playing...
So, #Scrivener on the Mac is telling me that the project I'm working on the iPad and iPhone isn't a valid project. This is not how I wanted to spend my day...
#BOTD Angela Carter, award-winning author, poet & journalist. Women are front and centre in her gothic horror and magical-realist tales, which broke taboos with their depictions of sexuality and graphic violence. Well-known works include The Bloody Chamber and The Magic Toyshop. #horror#author#books#bookstodon
#PennedPossibilities 305 — Are there any characters of yours that you wound up HATING once you were finished with a story or WIP?
Taking a cue from @floofpaldi on how to answer this one, I have characters that are HATEFUL but none that I hate. I'm not to a Conan Doyle level that I can hate a character so much that I want to kill off my Sherlock Holmes.
Occasional hateful characters are great fun to write and pit against my MC. She ticks off one misogynist prizefighter during a press interview where her trainer presents her as a contender. An off-handed remark. He becomes her boogeyman, but he's stupidly angry, obviously uses steroids, blurts racist epithets, and gets used by others as muscle. The time he attacks her on a crowded public street, she manages to get him to trip into traffic where he breaks his legs. She walks off with her "Starbucks" she'd put down on a newspaper rack to deal with him.
Another time he ambushes her in a quiet neighborhood midday when nobody is around. His first punch to the head renders her unable to use magic part of her martial art and leaves her stumbling. He fights only with brawn. He wants to kill her. How could you hate a character on character setup like that?
She defeats him with a child's wooden pull toy. Anymore would be spoilers.
Happiness is a bike ride on a gorgeous Friday afternoon. There are many challenges to being self employed, but the flexibility and time freedom of taking advantage of opportunities like this are worth the trade off.
Chatting with a visiting Kiwi author, Rachael King, in the bookshop today, she recognised me - turned out I had chaired her fellow Kiwi scribe at @edbookfest a few years ago, and she remembered me!
It really is a small planet (especially the literary part of it!)....
#WordWeavers 2405.01 — Introduce your setting as if it’s a character in your story.
[/Well, I decided to jump ahead in the WiP and write what might be the start of the next chapter. The title may be named:You Have Mail. Pardon the Dickensian texture; this is a first draft. —RS/]
I never expected a human habitation to feel as protective as my dorm room did. Sure, my lodgepole tent protected me through the blizzardy winters in the Fell Wood, as it did the wolf pack that had adopted me. I provided the tent, though. I repaired it, stored it, and raised it year after year. I maintained the cooking fire for all the wolves and cubs. It was I who was being protective, not it—or so it felt.
My dorm room wanted me to know that for the next few years, at least, it existed solely to protect /me,/ to comfort /me./ Increasingly, it did so as I added memories. Mother Wolf and I used one of the two small beds, the left one, piled with fuzzy brown blankets as needed or clothed with luxurious white cotton sheets that felt cool against cheek or jowl. Since I was tasked with the cleaning instead of the dorm servants, my room smelled of us, faintly of yeast, sweat, and a wolf that occasionally hunted rabbits but favored the cafeteria's pasture-beast stew.
The little red iron stove kept us warm through winter; the room's wood panel walls kept us shaded from the hot summer sun. It lovingly provided a rare enclosure—almost like walking within the orange and white rock walls of the slot canyons of the south woods—creating a remarkable silence in a land of noisy humans and huffing machines. This and its soft radiant cloud-light ceiling made me feel... what? Swaddled? Like being /home,/ as my parents would have used the word back on the farm when I was a child. My spirit books, fashion magazines, and papers cluttered the worn ink-stained blond pine desk. I ran my bare feet over the oval tapestry rug letting the patterns of wands and dryad trees caress my toes. My skin stuck to the cushy tan leather chair as I stood, but I knew that was it hugging me.
Situated to the rear of the building on the first floor, the casement window at the end of the rectangular space opened to the clay roof of a shed. Crisp autumn breezes fluttered the gauzy drapes as I looked out at the barrier forest beyond the stables, lit by the setting sun. The window conveniently allowed Mother Wolf to jump up, as she did right now, and clatter into the room as she pleased. She greeted me with an ever-wet red tongue on my face and backside. (A white wolf opening the front door of the women's dorm, with a key in her mouth, and walking in always frightened at least one student or professor. People called me their Wild Woman, but still never got used to the implications of the name.)
Best of all, as the special guest of Her Highness, nobody dared inspect my room. Everyone knocked, no exceptions. Wolf inside, right? Framed pictures of my boyfriend hung suspended by single powder blue silk ribbons, and they were /very/ inappropriate. Looking at him warmed me deeply, reminding me of being /us,/ together—so I didn't care that my foolish "civilized" human brethren might think. People existed to enjoy themselves, regardless of what nosy people might say. This room supported me as I lived here, trapped in the Townships because circumstance required me to learn to be "more human" as Her Highness was fond of saying. My little supportive enclave encouraged me to be me, and allowed me to dress or not dress as I pleased behind its closed oaken door.
When the House Mother knocked, I simply threw on a dressing gown. I turned the pictures around before answering—to be respectful. It tickled me that she never asked why I always smiled when I opened the door.
"Accuracy is so important to me,” Goyhood #author Reuven Fenton told The Algemeiner. “People assume that the ultra-Orthodox #Jewish community is the Jewish version of the Taliban and that’s not true at all.”
“Whenever you see anything media-oriented that has to do with Orthodox #Jews, if you’re part of that world in any way, you look at it and roll your eyes because they never get it right. It’s full of flaws, exaggerations, and misinformation,” added the first-time author, who is also the only Orthodox Jewish reporter on staff for the New York Post. “I felt it was my obligation, [and] that the least I could do in writing this #novel was to get everything on the money.”