This is Seanan McGuire's shorthand, and suricattus's extension, and it is wonderful ( Read more... )

For a fun change of pace, I am so happy to announce that the Storybundle Women in Fantasy is now live! This is a fast Storybundle, only 22 days, so you want to have this on your radar, and be sure to look it over and share with friends. We're talking ten wonderful authors, and if you have not met them all, you can look forward to hours and hours of ( Read more... )

Writer Jennifer Crusie always thinks characters and conflict when she's building a plot, so she can't help analyzing books, movies, and television the same way. Here she tears apart the plot for "Lucifier" and if you checkout her LJ, she then comes up with a much better series idea.

Maybe she'll write it.

Originally posted by jennycrusie at Questionable: ( Read more... )

Writer, artist, and editor Terri Windling shares many fascinating bits of folklore, art, and myth on her blog Myth and Moor. A recent post links to Charlotte Du Cann of Dark Mountain books, and her blog about a celebration for the Cailleach, Queen of Winter, the dark aspect who stands half the year against the brightness of Bridget, Queen of Summer ( Read more... )

I don't have Internet right now, so I am swooping in and out as wireless presents itself. But I did see this article on effective settings, and since it mentions something I consider crucial I thought I'd share.

Beginning writers often ( Read more... )

Over at Book View Cafe, writer Sherwood Smith talks about participating on a convention panel where everyone wrote up their top three problems/"don't do this" things, and then discussed them. My title is slightly different because some of us have blind spots and old tracks we follow, and we often remove the same things from our first stream-of- ( Read more... )

In our world today, especially if you live in the United States, it's easy to be so caught up in the proverbial Rat Race that you forget to take a break. I don't mean kicking back of an evening, melted in front of the TV, or prowling the Internet reading posts from friends and the latest news brouhaha. I don't mean a Stay-cation, where you ( Read more... )

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Writers are constantly urged to "write what you know." When writing especially SF or fantasy, that becomes a double challenge. You may be creating a profession that doesn't exist in the real world. But you can be rock solid on a crucial point. How does your character look at the world?

Writer Emma Newman, author of Planetfall, explains how "Write ( Read more... )

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