1) Why was that cave troll in the Mines of Moria so angry? A new perspective. Video
2) Unfortunate product placement.
3) Twelve year old uses D&D to help his dad advance science.
6) Jane Austen’s manuscripts, digitized.
7) Causes of Death You Won’t Want on Your Death Certificate
Not authors reviewing their own work, or authors reviewing work from the same publisher. They’re pulling down all reviews from authors.
And just in case you think they might be sorta cool about it, they’re back to their usual bot-speak:
Any further violations of our posted Guidelines may result in the removal of this item from our website.
Note that they’re not talking about the reviewer’s book. It’s the book he’s writing the review for that they’re threatening to pull. So you guys out there who were thinking of paying back your writer enemies by reposting reviews to their work until Amazon yanks them, now’s your chance.
Best of all, once your enemies start to complain, the response they’ll get will be short and sweet and made of copypasta:
I understand that you are upset, and I regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. However, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on this matter.
http://www.comcastmustdie.com is moribund now, isn’t it? Has anyone registered Amazonmustdie.com?
And since Shopp, the WordPress plugin I use to sell my stories has stopped working, I’m just going to link to them here. Everything is DRM-free. Use these files as you will.
If you want to read the book as a .pdf: Download.
If you want it as an .epub: Download.
If you want it as a Kindle-ready .mobi file: Download.
If you want all three as a single .zip file: Download.
Happy Halloween, you guys.
Edited: Sorry, but the giveaway is all done now. You can buy the book from the usual online shops but not from my website. Not until I find a replacement for the plugin I’ve been using.
Joss Whedon: THE PRINCESS REBELLION. Leia discovers a plot to undermine the new democratically elected queen of the empire and must uncover the scheme, develop her own force abilities, and prove she’s innocent of the murder of her brother. (Han Solo dies horribly, ‘natch.)
Christopher Nolan: THE DARK SITH RISES. Obi-Wan has to de-ghost himself to face a charismatic enemy, the clone of Annakin Skywalker. But is he truly a bad guy? (Spoiler: yes)
Kathryn Bigelow: THE HAN LOCKER. Han Solo leads a team of rugged but unstable fighting men against a hold-out band of stormtroopers armed with a death star-level cannon.
Brad Bird: THE KNIGHTS. The evil empire has been overthrown, but people are not ready to accept the return of the Jedi order as peacekeepers and intergalactic cops. A family of young Jedi must prove that everyone is special, no matter how pathetically low their midichlorian count might be.
Michael Bay: STUFF EXPLODES. Boba Fett rises out of the sarlacc like Princess Rita. Stuff explodes in a barely comprehensible way. Jar Jar plays a large supporting role and doesn’t even get killed.
Sofia Coppola: LOST IN TRANTHELLIX. An aging Luke Skywalker visits a distant planet for a lucrative speaking engagement, and befriends a gorgeous young gungan woman in an unhappy marriage.
Joe Cornish: ASSAULT THE MEGABLOCK. A towering skyscraper in one of Coruscant’s slums finds itself under attack from an accidentally-reactivated squad of Clone-War-era battle droids. (“Stop calling me Roger!”)
Wes Anderson: THE FANTASTIC MR. EWOK. A band of ewoks try to live like high-tech citizens of the empire, but are driven into an impotent frenzy by the way everyone speaks with their hands hanging motionless at their sides.
Amy Heckerling: LOOK WHO’S DUELING. It’s hijinks galore at the Jedi Academy for babies, where the massive midichlorian counts of the children allow the babies to wield lightsabers and oh god I just can’t go on with this.
Context: Disney acquires Lucasfilm, promises Star Wars 7 in 2015.
So Kathleen Kennedy will be taking over the franchise. Hey, she could hardly do worse than the prequels.
Here’s what’s interesting to me: Lucas made the first trilogy through Hollywood and blew the doors off the genre. When he finally returned to it, after so many years of trying and failing to do other work, he decided to go indie, with no other boss but himself.
We all know how well that worked out.
Now he’s back to it again, and he’s not only going corporate, but he’s turning the whole thing over to the corporations.
Some people just weren’t meant to put out their own stuff.
It’s almost November so I thought I’d post a little something about NaNoWriMo.
First of all, why does this happen every year in November? It seems like such a bad choice, what with Turkey Day falling near the end (for U.S. residents) when it can be tough to keep to the daily grind, not to mention the preparations for Giftmas. April would be better. Maybe March.
Next, there are always people who feel a little overwhelmed by the idea of fifty thousand words in thirty days. Don’t be one of them. The numbers might sound large but that’s less than 1,700 words a day.
Not every writer finds that sort of pace comfortable. When I was writing KING KHAN I was doing about 3K words a day, but EPIC FANTASY WITH NO DULL PARTS has been much slower, between 1.5K to 2.5K a day. Other writers might do 800 words a day on average, or a single page. There’s nothing wrong with that, because every writer works in their own way, at their own pace.
However! Many, many writers would consider 1.7K words a mediocre or disappointing day, so don’t be intimidated. One of the most valuable things about an exercise like NaNoWriMo is that it gives you a chance to stretch yourself and prove that you can do more than you expected.
That said, there are a number of ways to increase productivity and get those pages done. Since this is something I’ve been working on personally, I have some tips:
Just get it on the page. You can always rewrite later. Not every writer works this way (some make each paragraph perfect then move on and never return to it) but if you can get momentum, keep it going. If you don’t have momentum, force yourself to push until you get it.
Don’t stop at the end of a chapter or scene. If possible, end in the middle of a scene when you know what’s going to happen next. When you return the next day, the half-scene will help give regain the previous day’s momentum.
Know what you’re going to write before the writing starts. You don’t want to spend your writing time thinking about what you ought to write. Use your teeth-brushing time, your shower time, your commute time, whatever for that. Turn off the news/music/TV/whatever and plan the next day’s work. It helps.
Reduce your distractions while you write. I have to write at a coffee shop, because it’s impossible for me to ignore my wife’s and son’s voices. A few weeks ago I looked up from my revisions on KING KHAN and was surprised to see EMT’s in the shop working on a man who’d collapsed at the other end of the room. Apparently, the guy fell, 911 was called, the ambulance arrived and the paramedics came through the door to check on him, and I noticed none of it (-10 to Listen checks). But if my wife says “Hmph!” at the other end of the room I completely lose my concentration (and my wife is an extrovert, so it can be challenging for her to leave me alone.)
That’s why I get out of the apartment to get my pages done and, before I go I turn on Mac Freedom to thwart the temptation to check email or Twitter. Freedom doesn’t work for everyone, but there are a helluva lot of productivity programs out there to choose from. Try to find one that works for you.
Prioritize. Everyone has important things that need to be taken care of every day. The writing will only be done if you put writing time on that list. No one ever finds time for writing, they only steal it from something else. If you find yourself at the end of your day without having written a word, it should be clear that everything you did that day was more important to you. The little choices in our lives demonstrate the things we value most.
And there are many, many things more important than writing: caring for your kids, caring for sick loved ones, making your rent, caring for your own self. If you’re one of those people who can’t write because you are overwhelmed with important responsibilities, then you have my best wishes and I hope life stops leaning on you so heavily. If you didn’t get any writing done but managed to watch your favorite shows or argue politics on Facebook, that’s no big deal in the larger sense, but you’re showing what’s truly important to you.
Don’t get writer’s block. I know, right? There are some kinds of writer’s block that can’t be avoided: sometimes you’re depressed. Sometimes you’re grieving. Sometimes life stresses are so huge that the idea of sitting down and working out how to thwart an alien robot invasion seems trivial and overwhelming at once. Those writer’s blocks are legit, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
But if you’re “blocked” because you don’t know what will happen next, there are a series of questions that can help resolve plot issues. Make a list of the characters and ask: What does each character want in this particular situation? What resources can they access? How far are they willing to go? What line will they never cross?
Also, what tone are you trying to go for? It’s always easier to create conflict conflict conflict by making certain characters into irredeemable villains, but if you don’t want that, you’re going to need to work out a way for decent people to have conflicting goals that they absolutely must achieve.
This is what I just did for an upcoming chapter in my book: all the ideas I had were unworkable and/or cliche (including, I kid you not, an arena fight scene). I left my laptop at home and took a notepad and pen instead, making long lists of possible plot complications for that part of the story. The bad and cliche ideas went onto the page first so I could get beyond them, and within a half-hour I had what I needed.
Smart choices aren’t always the easiest ones. Writers we all admire–the ones who write moving, surprising books–sometimes seem as though what they do is magic. And sometimes it is (or at least, it seems to come from a part of the brain we don’t understand all that well so it seems like magic). But usually what’s happening is that they are generating a whole bunch of ideas and discarding the ones that aren’t excellent.
One of the best ways to bring momentum to your writing–and to be prolific–is to be excited about what comes next. So plan the next part of your book before you start writing it, take the time to consider all the creative choices available, and choose the best.
Good luck.
Sandy hasn’t yet finished blowing and raining, and the damage to South Jersey looks pretty shocking. I grew up in Philadelphia and spent many summers down the shore. It’s been decades since I made one of those trips, but seeing that those collapsed sections of boardwalk and ruined houses is heartbreaking.
I hope everyone reading this came through okay.
Yeah, Penguin has been spun off its parent company and will merge with publisher Random House. Also, Random House is my publisher for the Twenty Palaces books. The merger won’t affect me much at all, except that I will have one fewer market to sell future work. It does mean that some of the folks currently riding out Hurricane Sandy have to also worry about having a job once the storm clears.
This is a good place to read more.
For everyone in the path of Sandy who still has power to read this, stay safe.
Yes, I voted for Obama. No, it’s not a huge shock; even though the Green candidate was closer to my positions than the president, I held my nose and voted for the guy who drops bombs on innocent people in Asia.
That sucks, but it’s still better than what we were going to get from Romney, if his own positions could be believed (and they can’t). If it’s a choice between Obama and another neo-con, I know who I have to vote against.
Not that it matters all that much. Washington is a very blue state, so our electoral votes are not really in play. More important to me are the state, county and city issues: I voted to support same sex marriage, to reject charter schools, to reject supermajority requirements on tax legislations, to support sea wall repair in downtown Seattle, and to support marijuana legalization.
I also supported a mix of Democratic and Republican candidates, although you can probably guess that I voted for more of the former than the latter. On occasion, I’ve said (mostly-joking) that I’m about as far to the left as you can get while still remaining a capitalist, and the GOP has been moving further and further to the right in recent years, so there’s not many in that party who would be a good match for me.
Anyway: Duty done.
I can’t help but think that subject header is nothing more than an invitation for people to Beevis and Butthead this post.
Anyway, I enjoyed Rose Fox’s post on Genreville calling for stories that are less concerned with the plausible. People are feeling jaded and BTDT about the genre, yes? So why not break out of the boundaries we set ourselves regarding realism and believability?
Reading this reminded me of “hard fantasy,” a movement that writers and readers have tried to kickstart twice in the past ten years or so. The first time was supposed to be about fantasy based closely on mythology and folklore–essentially treating them as source material and avoiding other fantastical interpretations. The second time it came up was not very long after, in which hard fantasy was supposed to be little more than a well-researched story.
Which… fine. Nothing wrong with that. As stories go, having that element is neither good nor bad; other factors determine whether the story has value or not. However, back when people were talking about these movements, there was definitely a valorizing tone. “Hardness” was a virtue. Hardness was the way serious people who didn’t mind doing the hard work wrote their books. Googling “hard fantasy” brings up a few condescending blog posts on the subject.
Nevermind that remaining true to folklore is a silly metric. Never mind that showing detailed worldbuilding on the page is not appropriate for every story. This is about demonstrating science fiction-style hardness, and therefore your superiority to the rest of the genre.
And it’s misguided. There’s nothing wrong with hard science fiction as a category or an artistic goal, but the “hardness” of sf isn’t what makes it interesting, imo. I know there are other readers out there who put plausibility uber alles, but they’re a vocal minority. I don’t want to knock their tastes but I also don’t want a bunch of Stockholm Syndrome bullshit driving writers and readers toward the idea that it’s only serious (and therefore good) if it’s plausible.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to calculate the calories in an ounce of (fantasy-land) travel rations so I know how much my characters ought to pack.
By the way, if you find yourself burned out on a genre, take a break from it. Read something else: Westerns, romances, mysteries, popular literary fiction, high-tech thrillers. We all get old. We all grow tired of our favorite things once in a while. Feeling jaded? Walk away for a while, says I.
