All Entries Tagged With: "links"

Tons of Fantasy Links!

Listener Sara wrote in to tell me of an awesome Livejournal blog. Thanks, Sara!

I just figured I’d give you some links to Limyaael’s Fantasy Rants for the show. She’s an ex-LJ user who has hundreds of entries about everything from language creation to how to work with viewpoint. While she is focused mainly on fantasy, and these are mostly about her opinion on what shouldn’t be done, I think anyone can learn a lot by what she’s saying throughout her entries.

Links around publishing

• Well, the economy hits everyone, and word is that Houghton Mifflin is putting a freeze -temporarily - on purchasing new books.. All books, even agented ones, as I understand it. Bad news. Apparently they’re not closing to children’s or educational book submissions, though. So that’s good (for those writers, anyway).
• If you’re a writer with a new book and you want to get blurbs from other authors, there’s a fabulous article about the etiquette involved: Blurbs I: Getting.
• Matthew Cheney writes advice to his younger self at The Swivet. Rule #5 is the most powerful one. Read it.
• And lastly, Nathan Bransford has some interesting comments about the state of the publishing world. And puppies.

One thing gets in place, another slips

I have an ISBW recorded for you. It just needs editing. Why am I slack on this?

I’ve been writing.

Yeah yeah, the damn podcast implies that I should be doing that thing. If you listen, you know that discipline is a hard thing for me. But this week, starting last Sunday, I’ve been regular with the writing stuff. I’ve switched between Project: Underground and The Takeover, to great effect. The Takeover has one more episode to go (script-wise) and, damn me, yesterday I had a braingasm concerning a spinoff. (Don’t get your hopes up; it’s WAY down the priority list. But it makes me giggle, and it made the person who’d play the main character pretty excited too.) Project: Underground is chugging along and I’m pretty close to choosing a title. Interestingly enough, it’s what I thought I’d title it in the beginning, but I wasn’t sure.

So yay for all that. Sadly, it means that there’s been recorded audio on my computer that hasn’t been edited, and I’m sorry for that. I will get to it today, I really really hope.

In other news, I wanted to point you to two writing blogs I’m enjoying.

• The Burning Zeppelin Experience is by a fantasy writer, role-player and RPG writer (and no, it’s not me). I’m enjoying both the writing advice and the RPG tales.
• Urraca: A blog on writing and books is by a steampunk writer who is determined, opinionated, and damn funny.

And just general link salad:

• John Scalzi on Why You Need an Agent: The Foreign Edition
• Nathan Bransford is talking about Does Free Pay?
• And in dreadful irony, I have a bad habit of seeing something I want to give more time/attention to in Google reader, starring it, and never coming back to it. I discovered today I had 168 items in there. So I started going through, deleting the ones that were out of date, but then I discovered several posts from one of my favorite (but unfortunately for me, too prolific) blogs, Zen Habits. The topics? Focus, good days, and making time. *sigh* So I’m going to go read them now, and recommend that you take the time to check them out too, if focus and procrastination is as big a problem for you as it is for me. I will do what I can to catch up on blogs, and let you know the best ones here. But first, to read Zen Habits.

Latest news in writing/publishing

I always think I want to blog more, and then I never do. I don’t know what my blogging block is; maybe I think if I’m writing many words a day it should be on fiction? Maybe I feel that going on in a nonfic/news format isn’t really my style; maybe I just feel that people are reading others’ blogs and have already seen the news.

Or maybe I just think few people actually visit this blog, and only download the podcast via RSS.

Regardless, I don’t think any of those things are necessarily true. Maybe I’m just lazy. (And speaking of lazy, ISBW 101 is going up later today.) Still, a lot of things have been happening in publishing and writing, and I wanted to talk about them here.

• Tobias Buckell (who I met at DragonCon and who has agreed to be on the show sometime soon!) has three chapters of his novel, Sly Mongoose, up on his blog. You guys know how I feel about free/new media, so please, go there, check it out. The book is out in stores now (along with Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin, his other two books). Chapters One, Two, Three
• Speaking of Buckell, damn him, he may have forced me to get an Audible.com account. I prefer Emusic.com audiobooks (despite their horrendous practice of giving you books in 300+ bite sized files with incomprehensible ID3 tags) with no DRM, but admittedly, their catalog is not as big as Audible’s. But Buckell, along with Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi (ISBW interview here), Karl Schroeder, and Jay Lake, has done an Audible project called Metatropolis: The Dawn of Uncivilization. This looks amazing.
• Some authors have book leaks and respond to it irrationally (I can understand being upset that your book is leaked - not everyone lives by the “sell more by giving it away” mentality, and I respect that - but I think some of Meyer’s actions went a little far…). Now Techdirt reports that David Weber, instead of releasing a snippet of his WIP, Storm from the Shadows, he accidentally released the entire 250K word version. Instead of freaking or suing or ending Honor Harrington’s story, Baen Books has decided to offer the unedited “Oopsie” version up for sale. Savvy. Smart. Reasonable.
• The Writer’s Technology Companion blog just listed 10 Podcasts For Writers Worth Listening To - there are several here I hadn’t heard of, so I’m going to be checking them out. (and yes, squee, ISBW made the list!)
• Blogger and agent Kristin Nelson has posted about “overnight success” on her blog, listing how many people think that some authors just blaze onto a scene with no prior obscure toiling - but of course there was obscure toiling; THAT IS WHY IT IS OBSCURE. It hurts to realize, but you will likely be a writer for many years before you’re noticed. And this is pretty true; I have been trying to write seriously for 7 years now, and just got my first fiction novel published this summer. Persistence!

I have more news I want to talk about, but don’t want to overwhelm. And I have a podcast to edit. So do you want me to blog more? No? No opinion? Let me know in the comments.