Category Archives: General Writing Things

As those of you with a calendar know, we’re closing in on the end of National Novel Writing Month (also known as November).  I usually waiting until Nano is done to share my progress, but I thought it would be interesting to see what it looks like in comparison to part of the NaNoWriMo community:

That’s me on top, and one of the regions I’ve chosen as sort of close to me (the other being, um, “other”) below.  Note how my progress is steady as a rock, gradually pulling ahead of the pace needed to make 50,000 words by the end of the month, while those in Syracuse at large start fast and shamefully fall off – you can be assured that other regions are similar on average.  Obviously, other nano people could learn from me, as far as wordcount progress (someone else will have t0 give the seminar on how to produce a quality draft that doesn’t need to be completely rewritten – I can’t teach you everything, people).

It’s tough, coming up with ideas for stories and books and things.  Hence, the popularity, in writing workshops and such, of writing prompts – little ideas to both spur and limit creativity.  But who comes up with the prompts?  Some random guy who would have written his own story based on the idea if it was any good?  Pff.

Far better to harness the awesome powers of computers and artificial intelligence.  Not only were all those great titles produced by leading-edge technology instead of a boring biological brain, but you don’t have to worry about why a neural network didn’t use the idea itself – frankly, it’s got better things to do.

View at Medium.com

Well, another Worldcon is in the books.  It was a great con with great donuts, culminating in NK Jemisin’s acceptance speech for the Hugo for best novel.  Well, it didn’t really culminate in that, for those hanging out for the closing ceremony and so on.  But I had an early flight, so I went to bed and arose in the wee hours of the morning to get a cab.  And it was then that I witnessed a melancholy scene.  There were two groups of people engaged in drunken conversation outside the hotel, which is nothing unusual at Worldcon.  But now, only one of the groups contained someone with bright pink hair and a spangly rainbow dress.  The other group was three very well-dressed people sharing a wine bottle while one declaimed about “Winston FUCKING Churchill”.

It was sad, seeing San Jose being handed back to normal old wealthy people who like to yell about Churchill.

Then, on the plane home I overheard a snatch of conversation between two Worldcon-goers: “…so that’s how he found out about furries”, which cheered me up.

Once you’re done working your way through twenty-six years of Galaxy Science Fiction, another possibility is working your way through Tangent Online’s recommended reading for 2017.  The fact that my story, Peddler, in Grimdark Magazine happens to be on the list is, of course, incidental.

I’m a bit late to this, since it happened a while ago, but did you know that, thanks to archive.org you can read a good chunk of the run of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine for free?

Well, you can.  So go ahead and do it if you enjoy Bradbury and Asimov and so an (and who doesn’t?)

If you’re like me, you agree that there is nothing more annoying than reading a book in a series out of order.  It’s almost as bad as being prevented from compulsively reading the foreword, afterword, and author’s notes.

So you, too, will rejoice in the website Order of Books.  It lists different series of books in their proper order, both by publication (which is the easy part), and by chronological order, for those series where the author gets all famous and successful and either a) can finally indulge in exploring origin stories, or b) realizes they need to go back in time because they ran too far forward too quickly and risk their characters getting to old to jump from car to car during a freeway chase or whatever.

So now, with a quick check, you can read in comfort, secure that you won’t suffer the horror of reading Sharpe’s Eagle before Sharpe’s Havoc (seriously, Bernard Cornwell – when you give every book in a series a two-word title, and make the first word the same for all twenty-three titles you aren’t giving us all that much to go on)

Not to reopen the never-ending battle between advocates of literary vs. genre fiction, but I assume by now everyone has heard about the girl that saved a friend’s life using first aid techniques she learned by reading The Hunger Games.  I’d always assumed The Hunger Games was more useful for information on shooting people with arrows, but there you go.

But what useful skills has anyone ever picked up from reading literary fiction?  How to make cutting remarks?  How best to map the travails and grievances of previous generations of your family?

I’m just sayin’.