Thanks to Jessica who set up this promo for KRK in the bookshop where she works. World’s Biggest Bookstore Canada.
And here is the interview on SciFiFanLetter blogspot. Always a pleasure to talk to someone who loves books!
Category Archives: Writing craft
Coffee and a chat
If you are coming to World Con and you’d like to share a coffee with me, or any of the fabulous authors who are there, here is the link to the World Con KoffeeKlatsche page. It’s a chance to talk about books, the publishing industry, writing and anything that interests you.
Coffee makes the World go Around … the World go Around … sung to the tune of Money Makes the World go Around from Cabaret!
Filed under Fantasy books, Fun Stuff, Genre, Publishing Industry, Writing craft
The Writing Process
Or how I clean the house when I get stuck in my current WIP (Work-in-Progress).
No, seriously, I did a post about the writing process and, among other things, how rewriting over a word document means we lose the record of the stages a book goes through as it evolves.
Filed under Writing craft
Grump Alert!
Woke up this morning with the realisation that the wonderful twist that I’d added to my book yesterday would not work with the way I’d written the climax of the book.
Except I really like the twist because it adds layers to the characterisation and makes the character tortured. I do believe in making characters suffer.
Then had to go to work. Jumped on the train and it promptly broke down. Had to get into work to do a midday lecture. Had left extra early to get a lot of things done before the lecture. Finally got to the city. Had to literally run from the train station to the college to get to the lecture on time.
Worked like mad all day, trying to make up for lost time. Got through everything, then dashed to the train station and just made it down onto the platform to catch the train home only to discover the train had been sitting there for 45 minute already. Two hours later, after giving up and getting out 3 stations from the city with another10 to go, my DH picked me and drove me home.
All told I spent 4 hours sitting on trains and train stations getting to and from work when it should have been a total of 1 hour.
But I did come up with a way to use the twist and add another deeper layer which will make the character suffer even more. Take that, Queensland Rail!
Filed under Characterisation, Writing craft
Ramble on Writing
I just went to see the Inception movie. The premise is that someone can enter your dreams and they can construct dreams which feel so real, you don’t know you’re dreaming. In the movie they use this to steal information or plant ideas.
Listening to them talk about this kind of dreaming made me realise that writers do this all the time. In fact, we’d do it all day long, every day if the rest of the world would let us. For us the dream (our stories) is more real than reality. Otherwise why would keep coming back to write?
I saw this article which said that gamers, if they play games directly before going to bed, they can control their dreams to a certain extent.
Well, isn’t that what writers are doing all the time? When we are ‘in the zone’ we are lucid dreaming. The only thing that holds us back is the speed we can type at.
Inception was good. I liked the layers of the story and some of the visuals were breathtaking. I liked the main character’s motivation and it was a change for a movie to have a happy ending. Or was it?
Did you sit through all the credits like I did to find out if the top stopped spinning?
Filed under creativity, Fun Stuff, Genre, Movies & TV Shows, Writing craft
Anyone interested in writing for computer games?
Over at the ROR blog the Sunday Writing Craft post is a Beginner’s Guide to Writing for Games. It’s a two-parter with the second half being posted on Tuesday.
And this scary little girl is one of the ‘little sisters’ from Bioshock 2. The design of the game is very retro 1930s. I love the look of this period, everything from Art Nouveau to Art Deco.
Filed under creativity, Writing craft, Writing for computer games
The Gender Divide
I belong to a writing group called ROR. (For background on the group, see here). Every year or so we get together to review out manuscripts and give feedback. There are 8 of us, but numbers vary depending on our families, work, deadlines etc.
There are five females and three males in ROR, it just happened that way, but this year there’ll be even numbers at the ROR retreat.
Although I don’t think of it as a ‘reatreat’ I think of it as a writing craft feast. Spending time with other people who are just as obssessed about the craft of writing as me, is heaven. I love dissecting story.
There is no point denying it, mens and women’s brains work differently. (Architect’s and trucker driver’s brains also work differently). I have four sons, I know their brains are wired differently from mine. As a writer I don’t write for a male or female reader specifically. But I like to know that I can appeal to both genders and this is where having feedback from both genders helps. So I’m looking forward to the ROR feedback this year. (Not that I don’t always look forward to ROR).
As a writer I don’t limit myself to writing from a female View Point, I have male View Point characters, too. One of the things I like to do is run a chunk of male VP text through the Gender Genie, to see if the genie can pick the gender of the character.
They say boys won’t read a book if the narrator is a female character. I can’t say that this bothered my sons. And I must admit that I don’t mind if the View Point character is male or female, as long as they are interesting.
I’ve deliberately written short stories where I don’t specify the gender and let the reader make up their mind.
What do you think? Does the gender of the View Point character influence how you relate to the character?
Filed under Characterisation, Readers, Writing craft, Writing Groups
Mentoring Retreat in the Tropics
Good friend of mine, Sandy Curtis, is running a writing retreat at Kellys Beach Resort. So if you live up that way, near the coast in central Queensland and you’d like to spend 3 days at a lovely resort with a published mentor going through your book, short story or play …
Three storytellers will each offer their unique insights into writing at a mentoring retreat at Kelly’s Beach Resort, Bargara on the coast near Bundaberg, in Queensland.
The Bundaberg based professionals will mentor emerging novelists, short story crafters and playwrights over three days from 15-17 October 2010.
Mentoring the Muse is proposed as an intensive retreat-style development program similar to iniatives like the Varuna Manuscript Development Awards in NSW or the QWC/Hachette Australia Manuscript Development Program. These have been highly successful at supporting writers to improve their work to publishable standard, resulting in numerous publishing contracts for participants.
There is nothing like getting away from family and work and concentrating on your writing in a beautiful environment with other writers, while being mentored by someone who ‘gets’ your writing!
When friends have books coming out …
I get to celebrate!
Over at the ROR blog Kylie Chan has done a post on Sustaining Plots. Since this is book six of her Dark Heaven series, she can speak with authority. She’s also doing a giveaway of ‘Hell to Heaven’.
Go Kylie!
Go Trent!
My good friend Trent Jamieson has been interviewed over at The Australian Literature Review.
He talks about how he writes:
‘Well, I’m not much of a planner, so first drafts are generally me trying things out and trying to make sense of stuff. Most of this book was written at the Toowong Library (in the local history section) in longhand. I’d walk down there every weekday, that I wasn’t working, listening to the same music to get me in the right frame of mind (mainly, for the first book Okkervil River, Gotye, and Spoon) and write until I’d filled about eight pages or so of my notebook. Then I’d go home and type them into my computer.’
Having read Trent’s book in its final form before it went off to the publisher (and loving it then) I’m really looking forward to getting a copy of it when it released.
And over at the Galaxy blog, Trent has done a guest post on his new series and writing in general.
For more on Trent and his weird and wondferful world view, drop by his blog.
