Pretty much how my writing brain works: I have a major revelation. About the metaphysics of vampires. And how they relate to demons, angels, and gods. And how all of this is just an instantiation of Thomist metaphysics, and accounts for the problem of vampire souls and disappearing gods in my story ( Read more... )

Via our Sekrit SFWA Mole and other sources. Writer Beware Blogs has the details on a fake short story contest falsely claiming to be sponsored by SFWA. SFWA has confirmed it's not them. So if you hang with aspiring SF writers who might be taken in, please pass on the news.

Another for-my-reference writerstuff post.

Jo Walton explains her rather handy-and-powerful-seeming name-system generating algorithm here.

Also, a census-data-powered contemporary American name generator (with adjustable name-obscurity) can be found here.

This post paid for and approved by your local Gratuitous Hyphen Propagation Council.

Largely so that I can find it again later, here's a link to this piece by Elizabeth Moon on how to chose, and how to coach, your feedback readers in order to get more useful feedback. But if you're also a writer who wants to find the right people to provide feedback on their work, I commend it to you. It seems like pretty solid advice ( Read more... )

I hereby denounce the New Eclectics as a bunch of non-serious, impure mongrel revisionists of Ulm. I do this because Movement SF is dumb, and I want no part of it. Also, I have a dire fear of briarpatches. Go forth, my minions, and make holy war on Charlie. Or, you know, not ( Read more... )

So Ellen Klages is teaching a YA Fiction workshop through the offices of Richard Hugo House. Cool. In fact, there are several workshops in the series that sound interesting. The James Patrick Kelly workshop sounds particularly useful. Interesting writing workshops with fine writers, available locally -- keen, right? What's not to like ( Read more... )

So John Scalzi has a post up on the continuing appeal of Robert Heinlein, in which John claims that the blurb from Publisher's Weekly on the cover of Old Man's War, a blurb which anoints Scalzi as The New Heinlein, plays a significant role in how well Mr. Scalzi's book sells. It's perfectly possible that this is true. But if it is, I wonder how ( Read more... )

In case you don't already read the blog, I wanted to note that Teresa over at Making Light points to an excellent essay [NB: pdf format] of advice on writing -- it's aimed specifically at critiquing novels in progress, but it has lots of sound advice which applies to writing at any length. Mary Kay and Mris will presumably hate this piece of ( Read more... )