Ok, I’m back. No, it’s not actually news blather, but you will have noticed I share at least three other blogs on fb besides my own, and this is why: fb doesn’t like people. Well, ok, let me rephrase that. They like money more than helping people. As soon as I see another way to chit-chat with all my friends and family, I’m abandoning it like one of Dave Freer’s Rattesses.
So I share Mad Genius Club, According to Hoyt, and Nocturnal Lives on days it’s published, to make sure everyone has eyes-on that wants to see (or ignore. One nice thing about fb if you don’t want to see something, it falls off the timeline fast). However, today I’m experimenting with links and quotes here, rather than there. Less time, and I did promise more, but I had the opportunity to take a really nice Morning with my First Reader. Which means now I’m crunching down on finishing other things. Life… is more than work.
So here you go!
Failing Upwards
by Sarah Hoyt
“I did everything right. Why can’t I make it?” Maybe you haven’t tried hard enough. Try again tomorrow. Or do find something else to do, but make sure you’re not quitting everything as soon as it gets a little tough. No one has ever succeeded without setbacks.
Everything worth doing is worth failing at a few times before you finally get it right.
You’re not perfect, neither is the world. In the intersection of the two, there’s some terrible stuff that happens, but also surprises of unexpected beauty. (If I hadn’t been stupid enough to write a bunch of short stories attempting to break in, I’d never have learned to start a story fast.)
Roll with it. Cherish the success, but don’t believe you must have supreme success or be an utter failure. There’s gradations in between.
It’s where most of us live.
And when you fail, learn something from it, so next time you can fail higher up. If you keep failing upward you might, to your surprise, find yourself a success.
I Really am a Writer
by Amanda S Green
Sarah A. Hoyt, mentor and friend and she with the pointy boots she isn’t afraid to apply to my posterior, and I had gone to the annual RWA conference and had been having a lot of fun picking apart some of the books tat were being given away from free. There was the one with the vampire wedding — during the day,in a church, complete with faux blood champagne — that culminated with the vampire groom (who was also a lingerie designer, iirc) and the human bride flying off to their honeymoon sans airplane. Then there was my friend Kate Paulk’s favorite one where the male character was secured by having the favorite parts of his anatomy chained because, as she surmised, those parts were wild and might get into trouble if left on their own. Out of a fit of sheer meanness, Sarah challenged me to write something better than what we’d been laughing at. What I did know was it was all part of her plan to bring me out of the writing closet. There are even days when I thank her for it. 😉
Location, Location, Location
by Sarah Hoyt at Mad Genius Club
I once spent some time tallying the talents that could make you a bestseller. I grant you this study was skewed because at the time to sell at all you had to go via the gatekeepers and – by the time I came along – to be a bestseller, ditto.
Now that things are different, let’s put it this way: you can be a writer with a wide variety of following, and a mass of it, and yet only be good at an aspect of writing, like, say, characters, and be passable at the others, (off the top of my head, location, evoking a time/place and/or language) and totally drawers at another (for character writers that’s usually plot.) You can field a character so achingly alive that people will blink at the three-page climax and the way the villain folds like papier mache and say “ookay, that’s not what I expected” but they won’t in fact hold it against you. Or at least they’ll buy the next one.
Fantastic Fiction Flow Chart
by Stephanie Souders
At the top of the chart is the title: “Fantastic Fiction”. Below, I have defined “fantastic fiction” as any story “in which the fictional world differs from ours in a radical and comprehensive way.” That means you can’t just throw in one talking animal and call the story fantasy — unless it is suggested that talking animals are normal for your verse.
On the next level down, I have roughly defined the “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” categories. In my conception, “Science Fiction” is the appropriate label for any fantastic story in which some attempt – however flawed – is made to rationally explain the other-worldly elements. These explanations, of course, exist on a sliding scale from “hard” (scientifically accurate) to “soft” (requires suspension of disbelief), but the explanation is still present or heavily implied. “Fantasy,” on the other hand, is the appropriate label for any story that emphasizes “magic” or the irrational.
