Yes, It Is All My Fault!

I may be out of town, but I’m getting better at regular blogging! The secret this time was planning (and writing) ahead. Unfortunately, I had to switch the line-up order. Normally this is when the next Callie post would go up. However, this week’s episode needs a little more editing before it’s ready, so you get your weekend reading a bit early instead. This week, your link collection is:

TV Tropes — you likely have already lost plenty of time to this one, but if you haven’t, join in the memetic fun! I think they stretch things a bit thin at times, but it’s full of useful and semi-useful information, and the nested links will suck you in just as well as Wikipedia does.

If you wanted to know a bit more about the editing end of things, here’s a very nice essay on why the editor gets the award for a compiled anthology : Chris Conlon on editing

And if you’re a writer moving toward (or already in) the stage where you want to start sending your work out for rejection (and eventual publication, hopefully), one of the best sites for finding fiction and poetry markets as well as tracking deadlines and what you’ve sent out to where, visit Duotrope. It is free to sign up for an account, they fund themselves entirely on donations and give monthly reports on their income.

Getting the bad news out of the way first, here is an incredibly concerning article about the latest battle on the women’s equal rights front. I’ll get sterilized before I’ll live under any “pre-pregnant” laws if they actually start passing them…and if you know anyone who lives in Utah, get them to write the governor to veto!

In more pleasant news, I finally got around to joining the Horror Writers Association. I qualified as an Affiliate member with the publication of “Memory Box” in the Stoker Award-winning Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, by Dark Scribe Press. It slipped off my list of priorities in the busy-ness of the last several months, so I’m glad to have finally taken care of that.

Related to that, I found out this week that the World Horror Convention will be in Austin,Texas for 2011. How cool is that!

For those of you following the Callie posts, I’ll put up a separate page when we get a little farther along in the story, collecting them in one easier-to-read place. In the meantime I’ll post a link collection every 5 entries or so, like now!

Inside the Box
A Box Has No Windows
Opening the Door
At The Bar
Finding help?

First up, Geoff Manaugh, on whom I have a massive intellectual crush, writes the very excellent BLDGBLOG, combining architectural design niftiness with a futurist perspective. Here’s only the latest example of why I enjoy reading, especially the food-for-thought questions near the end. So many story possibilities!

On a more specifically writer front, Neil Gaiman linked to a two-part article in the UK’s Guardian containing “top ten tips” for new writers from published authors. I agree with Neil that Phillip Pullman is probably the smartest, though my vote for second-smartest advice are numbers 1 and 10 on Hilary Mantel’s contribution. Seriously folks, if you want to do this for a living, set up the financial support structure ahead of time. You really don’t want to be worrying about bankruptcy when a deadline is due.

Part One
Part Two

If you are interested in writing, editing, the publishing industry, speculative fiction, writers talking about writing, and other tidbits involving politics, the world around us, or semi-random well-written observations, then check out the following links:

Making Light — The online webspace for Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (and guest bloggers). Excellent resource: current information and essays about most of the above-listed points.

Tor.com — I’m only on the newsletter version of this so I don’t get over to the site every day, but the largest spec-fic publisher in the US has a wide selection of quality authors blogging regularly or occasionally on their website, as well as other enticing features for visitors such as free stories!

Storytellers Unplugged — I’ve mentioned these folks before. It’s a shared writers’ blog that features an author for each day of the month, blogging monthly about whatever comes to their minds about writing, writing process, publishing, and related topics. They seem to have mostly speculative fiction and horror writers blogging for them so anyone interested in those fields specifically might especially want to take a look.

Here’s another good one from Storytellers Unplugged, this time from Justine Musk.

5 hints for creative procrastinators

I noticed none of you took up my NaNoWriMo challenge, to give some kind of report on how it went for you, what you learned, and what you’d do differently next time. If you don’t want to put it in your own blog, why not in a comment here? I’m still interested!

I finished my holiday story rough draft, co authored with an 11-year-old idea man. It has zombies. And aliens. And robots, but it’s mostly about the zombies. After he and I look it over I’ll likely share it here for your amusement, but I doubt we’ll get to it until sometime after Christmas. What are you writing?