Let’s talk about fear for a moment. You hear a strange noise in the middle of the night. You sit up in bed with one hand pressed to your chest and the other clutching the sheets. Your breath catches in your throat. Is it a harmless push of air through the vents? Your cat knocking […]
Category > Writing
Delicious Prose
Stories are like meals. Some I tear through the way I attack a greasy mountain of chili cheese fries. I slurp them down, satisfying guilty cravings that sometimes leave me regretting the experience. Â Others are like expensive sushi, and I let each morsel linger on my tongue, willing it to melt slowly into memory. I […]
Guest Post: Research, or, Why You Should Start at the Library, by John Klima
John Klima is the Assistant Director of the Waukesha Public Library. He also edits the Hugo Award–winning magazine Electric Velocipede. As of 2010, the magazine has also been nominated for the World Fantasy Award four years in a row. In 2007 Klima edited an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories based on spelling-bee winning […]
Goal-Setting for Creatively-Minded People
Awhile ago I read this post at Nature titled “Goal-Setting for Scientifically Minded People.” It talks about how the goal of science isn’t something that can be easily measured or projected for, because a big part of science is discovery. While goals in science aren’t completely useless, you can’t say that Newton had the goal […]
On perceived limitations, or writing what you think you don’t know
I wrote this post and then realized that I’d read it somewhere before. It was on the blog of my friend and fellow Inkpunk Andy, who had a very similar experience to the one I just had: We both found out we could write science fiction. No, really! It’s a real discovery. One of the […]
Rules of writing: the auto-tune of literature
No one can tell me how to be me. The same goes for being a writer. Yet, I can’t help myself. The internet is full of mostly well-intentioned advice on writing — forums, essays, lists, and opinionated rant — and I soak it up. Chuck Wendig’s blog, one of my current favorites, is full of fun […]
Motivational Quotes for Writers
When I competed in fitness competitions, I used motivational quotes to help me put my best effort into every training session, to stick to the strict diet and to keep my enthusiasm high. I had them all over the place, in my workout journal, in my competitoin scrapbook, on the fridge and in my travel […]
Getting a Handle on Your Short Story Queue
At the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat, there was a friendly competition to see who who could win the highest word count (for my session, it was Keffy, who did most of a NaNoWriMo in 3.5 days). I, on the other hand, was putting down more calories (in the form of brownies and cake baked each day […]
Time to Regroup
Like Wendy, John, and Sandra, I was at Rainforest Writer’s Retreat last week, too. I went with the purpose of working on my first novel, a beast I’ve been wrestling with since last year. I’d done all the necessary elevator pitches, outlines, synopses, and so forth, and had over 22k words written, so I figured […]
Satisfactory Sub-plots, Now With Pictures
Howard Tayler is the writer and illustrator behind Schlock Mercenary, the Hugo-nominated science fiction comic strip. Howard is also featured on the Parsec award-winning “Writing Excuses†podcast, a weekly ‘cast for genre-fiction writers. Howard’s artwork is featured in XDM X-Treme Dungeon Mastery, a role-playing supplement by Tracy and Curtis Hickman, as well as in the […]
