In the past couple of days, Justine Larbalestier has posted some nifty stuff, including this one on character building, which caused another writer to add a riff on what works and what doesn't for her in character building seminars and panels. She said she's squicked by techniques like interviewing characters, or pretending characters are in the ( Read more... )

I belong to the Group Blog at Deepgenre; things had gone somewhat more quiet for a space, there, while everyone dealt with deadlines and life, but are revving up again.

Yesterday I combined a couple of riffs I tried out here in December, into this post.

If you feel like it, drop on by, or else cruise the previous posts. There are some good ones

A person contacted me, who is doing a study on paracosm--those who write about other worlds. How cool is that? I never knew there was a name for what, when I was a kid, was referred to as "stupid little stories about magic children ( Read more... )

Here's something I found interesting, anyway. Within the past couple of weeks, four writers I'd thought genre authors have stated that they write literary fiction.

What does that mean to you, literary fiction? Do you think it exclusive or inclusive of genre tropes, spec fic elements, or story patterns usually found in genre ( Read more... )

The Trouble with Kings is now out in print, after coming out last winter as an e-book. This is from Samhain, and I know it's here on-line, but don't know if bookstores carry Samhain books (or rather, will carry mine ( Read more... )

I read the Atlantic Monthly article with the graph that resonated with me, but put off others ( Read more... )

metteharrison makes what I thought good observations on being teen, adult, power, what makes an adult--and how this translates out into literature for YAs as opposed to lit for adults.

Within the past couple of days two folks have been talking about networking from the perspective of search engines and ranking (I still don't know what that means, and don't really care) --starshipcat shares a year of research here and david_de_beer talks about it here--causing a peculiar echo effect as he's referring back to an old post of mine, when I asked about ( Read more... )

Yesterday carbonelle posted a thoughtful discussion about experience and unpleasant subjects, which is a side route to talking down or writing over the reader's head. carbonelle makes an excellent point that many readers have plenty of Life Experience but do not want their reading experience to drag them through fictional drear, when they read to escape that. Yet ( Read more... )

scbutler linked to this article about Joe the Plumber publishing a book. [Edited: before I said 'he got a big advance' which turns out not to be true. But the general drift of the article hit a nerve for me and others, so I leave the rest to stand.]

Quote that got to me:

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom ( Read more... )