…Prepare to Die.
Cerebral Adventures & Magic by Illise Montoya (and then some!)
Category Archives: Reblogs
8 Elements to NAILING Your Plot & Owning NaNo
Good tips! I’ve been thinking of doing NaNoWriMo this year (finally).
Attack of the Killer Plot Bunny. That rabbit is DYNAMITE!
I promised not to leave you guys hanging with my last post. Now that I have a lot of you beating your shields ready for NaNo, I’m going to give you battle tactics to come out victorious (or maybe at least alive).
Sure, NaNo is great to just learn to turn off the Inner Editor and get those 50,000 words DOWN. But, if in the end, all we have is a gelatinous ooze that eats people and attacks the city? They call in the National Guard to take out our WIP, because no revision can tame it.
What to do? This post is incredibly redacted, but it’s a blog. So roll with it 😉 .
These tips will work for any novel, but they are SUPER important in NaNo, lest we write ourselves into the Corner of NO Escape by…
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“You can’t do that! Stories have to be about White people”
Young Writers of Colour
I’ve spent almost two decades teaching in English primary schools, which serve multiracial, multicultural, multifaith communities. I want to explore two things I have noticed.
1) Almost without exception, whenever children are asked to write a story in school, children of colour will write a story featuring white characters with ‘traditional’ English names who speak English as a first language.
2) Teachers do not discuss this phenomenon.
Furthermore, simply pointing these two things out can lead to some angry responses in my experience.
Why are you making an issue of race when children are colourblind?”
is an example of the sort of question that sometimes gets asked.
Well let’s look at that. If children were writing stories where the race of characters was varied and random, there might be some merit in claiming that children are colourblind. However, even proponents of racial colourblindness…
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Dear son, don’t let Robin Thicke be a lesson to you
***Update, August 1: In response to the thousands of people who, after reading this entire post, decided to harp on one single phrase (“I’m no feminist”), I wrote this. If you want to know how I can say all the things I say here, yet still reject “feminism,” click the link and I’ll explain. Otherwise, carry on. Thanks for stopping by.
Our country dangles on the precipice of starting a third World War. We are on the verge of a completely unnecessary conflict where the United States will fight along side Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This, in another day and age, might earn the crown as the Most Controversial Story of the Week. But we’re in the year 2013, and this is America, so a young pop star’s dance moves on an MTV awards show have predictably overshadowed the prospect of global chaos and bloodshed. I wrote…
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Thrillerfest, The Publishing Apocalypse & Why Is There Cause to Celebrate?
A great post by Kristen Lamb. Brick-and-mortar establishments are losing out to Amazon, and while this doesn’t mean book stores will be gone forever, it does require us writers to think of the future–which IS the internet. At the very least, every writer should have an online presence. I’ve learned a lot in the last two years, but I haven’t been able to fully implement my knowledge for a more rounded approach to blogging, networking, and online promotion. But the evidence seems clear to me that once I’m able to dedicate my time to these things, it will only be to my benefit. I just can’t understand why so many people want to believe in a dying business model…
Thrillerfest is a phenomenal conference packed full of experts and even heroes. It’s also a unique conference in that it takes place in NYC, right in the heart of traditional publishing. One of my major goals for WANA has been to serve writers—ALL writers. Publishing has been a One Size Fits All model for generations, and a lot of great writing has been collateral damage.
In fact, the paper-driven paradigm had driven many forms of writing to the brink of extinction—short stories, novellas, poetry, serials, pulp fiction, epic fiction, etc—simply because these types of works were a bad investment for a business that must turn a profit in order to survive and keep investing in new authors.
WANA LOVES ALL WRITERS
WANA has always made it a point to never make authors feel they needed to choose sides. Traditional is a better fit for some authors and indie isn’t for…
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Quality RE-Check
Social media and using it properly, as I’ve mentioned before, is still a bit beyond me. The past few days I may have gotten heavy on the negative, though I hope I dispersed that enough with interesting and otherwise amusing posts. You won’t ever see me posting about politics all the time on this blog, but I think it only natural to hear what I have to say with America’s presidential election so close. I believe most of you share some of my beliefs, though I won’t be so arrogant and presumptuous as to presume that you agree with everything, or that ALL of you agree with ANYthing. After reading this post from Kristen, I’ve decided to keep a tighter control on my posts—both to be considerate to the people in my life as well as to you readers. 🙂
The world around us is changing so quickly that most of us struggle to keep up. New paradigms call for new rules and new social norms. What do we keep from the old? What do we add to the new? The common denominator to all this social media technology is the human heart beating in its center, and we are wise to remember this.
Yet, we do run into dilemmas. How much personal information should we reveal? How professional should we be? A lot of experts seem to have conflicting advice, so I am here to clear all of that up…
They are wrong and I am right :D.
Unless these experts are telling you the same things I am, then they are also right and amazingly brilliant and insightful. Odds are they are probably freakishly good-looking, too.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Advice.
I know that writers are encountering…
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St. George and the Dragon — Tintoretto
I could start a new story just based on this painting…
...Prepare to Die. 