I read on Authoress Anon’s wonderful blog today about how she has started planning her plots as she writes. That got me thinking about my own process. My first two novels I just wrote straight through. No planning. This went reasonably smoothly in the first one, except the entire ending had to be redone. It [...]
Archive for September, 2010
Synopses and other tools
Posted in Fiction on September 29, 2010 | 3 Comments »
The three C’s of chili
Posted in Food on September 27, 2010 | 2 Comments »
I’m making chili, because some friends on Twitter were talking about it and I was inspired. It’s a rainy day, too, which makes chili seem more appropriate. And I figured I’d post about it, since it’s been a long time since I wrote anything about food. I have two kinds of chili. The first is [...]
What’s the opposite of dramatic irony?
Posted in Fiction on September 24, 2010 | 7 Comments »
I found myself asking that question yesterday as I was reading. So, as we all learned in high school, dramatic irony is when the reader knows something the character does not. (The classic example of this is when Odysseus gets back to Ithaca and is competing with the suitors, and we all know who he [...]
Nothing is New
Posted in Fiction on September 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Between trying to finish the major revisions on my novel and obsessively reading the Codex Alera series, I’m not really feeling combobulated (is that a word? It is now) enough to write a cohesive blog post, but here are the thoughts running around my head right now. I know there are no really new ideas, [...]
Prerequisites for strong women in fantasy?
Posted in Fiction on September 20, 2010 | 2 Comments »
I’ve been devouring Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series recently, and I had an epiphany while reading them, about some features of fantasy societies that are often put in place in books that have a lot of strong female characters. 1. Magic to be used in fighting Lots of fantasy societies have magic, and it’s easy [...]
Retro-futurism
Posted in Fiction on September 17, 2010 | 4 Comments »
A quick post today on one of my favorite topics: why we still read old science fiction. This post probably gave you some sense of what I like in science fiction, and a lot of it is old. That isn’t to say that I don’t read modern science fiction, but I love reading the old [...]
E-book possibilities
Posted in Fiction on September 15, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I’m back! And I’m feeling optimistic, so today I’d like to talk about some possibilities I see for enhanced e-books. I’m not particularly interested in exploring the addition of pictures, animation, video, or audio to books. Those things are already being done (in iPad apps, for example) to great effect. What I’m interested in is [...]
Must-read science fiction
Posted in Uncategorized on September 10, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I don’t have time to write a real blog post today (and maybe not Monday) but I wanted to post something. This list is an interesting take on important works of science fiction. There are some really interesting choices there (I’ve read Herland, but I don’t know anyone else who has), and a lot of [...]
A Beginning is just a Short Story
Posted in Uncategorized on September 8, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I had an epiphany on Monday night while reading Piers Anthony’s On a Pale Horse which has caused me to completely rewrite the first chapter of my novel-in-progress (again): A good first chapter is just a short story with a twist. To some extent, I think every chapter is like that. (On Twitter the other [...]
Jambalaya!
Posted in Food on September 6, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
It’s been too long since I posted any food, so here’s a recipe. We made this for dinner Saturday night (and watched the old Dr. Who episode “Genesis of the Daleks” while we ate it). It’s not authentic in the slightest, but it was tasty! Start with a roux: butter and flour cooked together until [...]
