I’m having so much fun learning to do multi-media presentations that I figured I’d inflict my enjoyment on all of you. 🙂 (Aren’t you lucky?)
This is a brief, three-and-a-half minute presentation on how to get a permalink to a forward-dated post in Blogger. I hope it’s useful to you.
Enjoy!
Just wanted to give everyone a quick update – my coauthor, Rachel Wilder, has agreed to help me finish The Night Is a Harsh Mistress! Stay tuned for my next post, which will have the next chapter.
Happy writing!
Despite it all, her spirits are higher than one would expect. Through these past days we have smiled and laughed over all sorts of things, both past and present. The whole experience is really making me grateful for my physical and mental abilities.
Simple tasks like caring for hearth and home are beyond the reach of Mom. Reading, let alone writing, are joys I will cherish more than ever before. Gratitude for my father’s good health, his care and patience, go beyond what I can express.
I hope to return home with a renewed sense of what is important. Little setbacks should be taken for what they are and not be allowed to ruin a good mood.
We shall see how Mom does in the future. There is hope for improvement.
Please find a source of joy in your daily life, and best wishes to you and yours!
I kissed him, lightly but with a shudder of fervour across my spine, as if I had wings that were trying to unfurl.
This could easily continue as a review of the book. Instead, I want to share what this line inspires in me as a writer.
Adoring the idea of romantic relationships between men, I try to offer that feeling through my storytelling. Yet, in retrospect of reading Ms. Fox’s line, perhaps my methods are too clinical. Now I feel challenged to experiment with more emotive descriptions, even sprinkling in a line or two that some might consider flowery.
After all, a guy should be allowed to think in a baroque way once in a while, even if he’d feel cheesy expressing the words. Wish me luck in convincing “my” men.
Please check out Amazon’s Harper Fox Page And happy writing!
I’m so excited! Today I start a new job. It’s interesting the kind of serenity having security can bring. When I was young, I thought I liked change and was comfortable with uncertainty. It’s taken me years to realize that’s not true, and that I perform better in a solid routine.
What kind of routine helps you find peace, the peace to create or the peace to write?
In honor of the fourth, I figured I’d share four tricks to keep up my writing during holiday functions. So here we go:
1. Write 3 pages of longhand writing at some point throughout the day. Start with a list for the barbecue, if you need to, or list all the stuff you want to get done. Anything to fill up those pages.
2. Sneak the laptop into the bathroom and set the timer for a ten minute sprint.
3. Write a hundred words on “I like holidays in the middle of the week because…”
4. Recognize that it’s a holiday. If you have people over, or are going to someone’s home, remember that this is about them. If you need to take a word count break, then do it. Enjoy the day.
Happy fourth!
I read an interview with a successful comic book illustrator this morning. My heart warmed when I came to the part about how an older, established artist took him under his wing for mentoring many years ago. They arranged for a year of this tutoring that got the younger man started off on the right foot.
Or so I thought.
The lessons might have been valuable and established a career, but they were punctuated by constant criticism. Even years later the elder artist had nothing good to say.
While together at an art showing much later that showcased them both, he said to the younger, “You really can’t draw, can you?”
Wow.
Understandably, this blow crushed the artist for some time to come. Overall he didn’t let it get him down by his own account but this attack made me ill. The artist spent years getting past the unnecessary pain to obtain well-earned acclaim outside the shadow.
Please, think before you criticize. And to all, I wish blessed creativity.
First let me say that he is a gifted singer and respected choral arranger and director. He leads a large chorus of barbershop quartet singers, dedicating a great deal of time and effort to their success. Recently, he attended a conference, the source of his anecdote.
Asked to sing before a group of his peers, he in turn listened to several of them. After the solo, each man was asked to share one thing he liked about his fellow performers’ offerings. Then each sang the same song again.
The claim my brother made – that everyone performed better the second time – really impressed him. In turn, I found it striking how he had to stifle his inner critic for the praise to get through.
He’s going to start encouraging his guys to positively critique one another, especially if those words accompany constructive criticism. This strategy is one I believe in one hundred percent in the writing world, and would like to enlist everyone’s help in spreading the positivity. As a side benefit, you’ll feel good for brightening someone’s day.
So jump on those forums and websites, twitter and face pages. Tell your favorite authors what you enjoyed about their story.
Other routes can entail religion and politics. These systems most often play a key role from what comes to mind – Frank Herbert’s Dune series is a fine example – but that doesn’t mean a writer can’t imagine aspects that don’t make their way into the tale. Such details can drive a character’s actions as well as build substance without necessarily needing detailed inclusion in the final text.
There are many ways author’s draw the reader into a story, and shaping a believable culture within which the characters interact is one of my favorites, as both a writer and reader. A. Catherine Noon explains beautifully the resources she and Rachel Wilder tapped from the real world. I highly suggest you scroll down and enjoy learning much more about this process.
If you haven’t already, please go out and purchase Emerald Fire. Happy reading!
It’s hard to believe it. We wrote it, and edited it, and loved it into existence. Countless hours spent on the phone and in emails and chat, working and playing with it. We’ve created a whole world in Persis, one that is so real to me it seems as though I should be able to open a door and step into it like walking through the armoir into Narnia.
Emerald Fire, the first in what we hope to be many novels about Persis, is available now from Torquere Press! We are very excited and pleased to bring it to you and hope you will enjoy it as much as we did.
While a brief blurb and excerpt are available on the website, I thought I’d talk a little about the process of worldbuilding that we developed as we worked and played on this novel. I grew up reading mysteries by Phyllis A. Whitney and fantasy novels by such authors as Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, and Ursula K. Leguin. Patricia McKillip and Steven Brust are two more of my favorites. Rachel grew up reading fantasy as well, like the Sword of Shannara and other quest novels, as well as a lot of romance like the Harlequin white-covers. We got to talking one day and wondered what it would be like to write a world of Sheikhs and Harem Girls, only where the Girls were Boys – since we write M/M romance.
Persis is based from that concept. We looked at ancient Persia and developed our culture from there. Our two main cities are Cyrus and Darius, after two of the greatest rulers of ancient Persia – and the world. Darius I, known as Darius the Great, ruled over much of what is now Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. We wanted the settlers of Persis to know that and want to honor their ancestors. The third city, newer than Cyrus or Darius, is Reghdad and is a name we made up based on Baghdad.
One of the first challenges we came across is one of distance: first, how far apart are these cities? Second, how long does it take to travel between them? After all, if there aren’t paved highways and modern cars, how to folks get around? (“What’s the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”) We drew a map and estimated distances, then estimated how long each of our styles of vehicle would take to travel between the cities.
Another challenge is how to keep everything organized as you’re developing it. We decided to write a “Concordance” for our world, in which we track everything from geopolitical relationships and macroeconomics to the Keeps and their customs of dress. It’s great fun, especially if you enjoyed learning stuff like this in school but never really figured out how to apply it in the real world. The made-up world. Persis. Whatever. You get the picture.
We hope you enjoy the story as much as we do, and that our efforts to make it come to life are successful. Enjoy!
Resources
Wikipedia article on Darius I, accessed 06/11/2012
Monty Python – Airspeed Velocity of a Swallow, accessed 06/11/2012