Happy New Year! Hope everyone has had some time to make peace with 2018 and is looking forward to 2019.
The holiday week is always a little scant with respect to content. Still, here’s a small, but tasty batch of informal writerly learnings to start 2019 right 🙂
Looking for your informal writerly learnings? Here they are:
Piper Bayard and Jay Holmes stop by Writers in the Storm: Know your firearms! Magazine or clip? A frequent error of less experienced contemporary authors, and a repeated question asked of the experts. Get the low-down from Bayard & Holmes.
Robin LaFevers goes on an unexpected journey: creativity’s ebb and flow. “It is not unlike religion in that by engaging in it, we are forced to interact with the world on a deeper, more intimate level than we might otherwise choose to.” Writer Unboxed
This will be the last Tipsday before #NaNoWriMo! Once again, where did the time go?!
Just to be clear, for the month of November, I will be desperately attempting to write 50,000 words of a new novel project. There will be no curation. I have, however, decided to do quick check in posts, once a week, so the blog will not be totally inactive. More on that in this weekend’s next chapter update.
In the meantime, enjoy some informal writerly learnings!
It’s time for your weekly dose of informal writerly learnings.
/rant on/
I’ll start off on a negative note. Harlan Ellison died last week, but I have purposefully not posted about it or shared any posts about it on social media. Though he was influential in the science fiction universe and wrote much that is considered objectively great fiction (he was even a consultant on my favourite series ever, Babylon 5), I have never read any of his work. I wondered why that was and realized that I instinctively disliked the man in the interviews in which I saw him. Since, I have learned that he was a universal asshole and a misogynist prick. The incident with Connie Willis at the 2006 Hugos was just one, very public incident. For the record, I may read his work someday, but regardless of what I think of the man as a writer, I will always think of him as a poor example of a human being. I don’t care what his damage was, to be honest. It’s no excuse. We must do better, be better, than the pathetically low bar he set.
Susan Spann says, fear is a liar. Inspirational. Writer Unboxed
Barbara O’Neal considers light and dark, and writing with duende. “Duende is the dark magic, the force of Other, that enters the work and turns it from something interesting, maybe even really good, into something transcendent. It is born of the knowledge that death walks among us, that sorrow will mark you with her handprint, that we are all doomed to be forgotten.” Yum! Writer Unboxed
I hope all of my Canadian friends had a LOVELY Canada Day long weekend (today will have been our Tuesday-that-feels-like-a-Monday) and that all of my friends in the US will have an equally enjoyable Independence Day holiday.
Be well until Thursday rolls around and don’t forget to come back for some quality thoughty.
Liz Michalski advises you to blow it up (where it is a practice that no longer serves you). Writer Unboxed
Julie Carrick Dalton shares her thoughts on finding second life in cast-off words. I might have to try her fire brick idea some day. I’m not craft-inclined enough to try the other stuff 🙂 Writer Unboxed
Porter Anderson watches the Canadian problem with Access Copyright with interest and alarm. Authors I know whose work was copied for academic packages used to get paid. Universities rebelled and now they get nothing. Advocacy and authors. Writer Unboxed.
Keith Cronin writes a thought-provoking post for Writer Unboxed: when a bad person makes good art. I’ve struggled with this issue myself and there are no easy answers, at least none that satisfy both my need for social justice and my need for quality art to consume.
Always Looking Up 