If you’ve seen SW:TFA, you may remember that island where Ray finds you-know-who at the end. Guess what? It’s a real place: Skellig Michael, in Ireland. Irish Central.
C.S. Lakin calls these stylistic devices. I call them rhetorical figures. I lurves me some rhetoric. I blame the politicians for rhetoric’s pejorative connotation 😦 However you choose to look at them, they’re a lot of fun and can add something special to your writing.
George R.R. Martin uses it. So does Robert J. Sawyer. Find out why Wordstar is the preferred word processor for these authors.
And speaking of nifty writer tech, here’s Jamie Raintree’s new writing and revision tracker*. This is the spreadsheet that revolutionized my attitude toward my writing. I hope it will do the same for you 🙂
*This year, Jamie’s made the spreadsheet fairly foolproof. You can only enter data into certain cells. So much easier. I’ll still do a little post on how to set it up, but it won’t be as extensive as I thought based on past years.
Week before last, I transcribed my notes of Nina Munteanu’s workshop on ecology and story, including extremophiles and quasi-extremophiles like tardigrades. So when I came across this Buzzfeed post, I thought: Strange, but totally amusing. The Disney Princesses as tardigrades.
Leah Schnelbach liked the SyFy adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End well enough, but Phil and I weren’t impressed. Now Phil is a scientist and a SF purist, so his reaction was understandable. My disappointment? Not so much. I’m still working it through, but I think it has something to do with the storytelling decisions made. The critical error in my estimation (so far)? Whose story is it? What character is there from beginning to (almost) end? Karellan. That’s who. Now that’s a story I would have liked to see. It would have been a bigger departure from the book than what SyFy gave us, but I think it would have been better. That’s just my opinion, though.
Because the costume makes the period drama part of Outlander shine, Frock Flicks is giving us droughtlander sufferers a sneak peek at the season two wardrobe.
Good words to you, my friends. The light is returning! Or maybe it’s just the Earth turning/tilting? Meh. Precession and all that.
See you in two days for some Thoughty on Thursday 🙂
It’s been another great week of Writerly Goodness.
Jane Friedman offers her thoughts on privilege and luxury with respect to her productivity. This is particularly interesting in light of my The next chapter update of last week.
Here’s one of the articles Jane links in her post (above): The writing class by Jaswinder Bolina for the Poetry Foundation. I actually shared one of the others last week . . .
K.M. Weiland returns to her most common writing mistakes series with this entry: Anticlimactic endings.
David Corbett explores shame, guilt, and hope, referencing other excellent posts by Tom Bentley and Donald Maass, in this post for Writer Unboxed: The redemptive arc.
What you should do in an active shooter situation. I can’t believe we need posts like this, but an ex-pat friend confesses she’s already had active shooter drills at her workplace. The Art of Manliness.
Not gonna give you my NaNo update this Thursday. You’re going to have to wait until Sunday and my epic Next Chapter update (October and NaNoWriMo). Also, I’m writing the draft through to the end, using my momentum to put this one to rest before the end of the year!
And yes, you read that right at the top of this post. Now that NaNo is over, I’m returning to Saturday posting 🙂 First is Next Chapter, which will be up Sunday instead of Saturday because of a family function this week. Then, I’m rewinding to CanCon 2015 and I’ll be sharing those posts into next year!
Always Looking Up 