Sunday Links: October 30th, 2011 Edition

I've been mentioning NaNoWriMo during each of these Sunday Link posts in October, now the time is almost at hand. I still have a bit of work I'd like to get done as prep work, but I have a reasonably good feeling about where I stand. Hopefully a week from today I'll still be feeling optimistic. Anyone who wants to be a writing buddy on the site and hasn't found me there yet can add me as a buddy via my NaNo site profile.

In addition to the good news I got earlier this week about my story being accepted as one of the winners for the October Kazka Press Flash Fiction contest I also heard today that my story "My Name is Imago Montoya..." finished in 8th place in the second Platform-Building Writers' Campaign challenge. Woo-hoo! Thanks to Saba from Of Thoughts and Words, Margo Kelly, and Janice Seagraves from Janice's Home for donating the prizes which I won and to Rachael Harrie and all the others who volunteered to coordinate the challenge.

Now for this week's links!

"15 Ways to Make the Most of Snippets of Writing Time" (Margaret Telsch-Williams at Confessions of a Fiction Writer) - Margaret talks about how to use even small chunks of time to move forward with your writing. Some of her suggestions struck me as being maybe a touch ambitious for the slices of time she proposed, but most of them made perfect sense and I love the philosophy of the piece. You don't have to have huge four-hour chunks of time to write.


"The Secrets of Good Blogging" (Jim C. Hines at Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists) - Jim talks about what makes for a blog that people will be excited to come read. It boils down to one basic thing: "be interesting by being yourself." Hat tip to Karen Woodward for pointing me to this link.

"Protecting What You Love" (1000th Monkey) - A post which talks about working with critique partners and beta readers. The crux is that when you set out to write the story there presumably were one or more central things about it which drove you to write. It may have been exploring a specific technology, or unfolding a character's journey from state A to state B, or whatever... Those central things about the story are the ones which are generally worth holding onto when going through revisions even if you may have to change a lot of the meat which hangs on their bones.

"Mapping Your World" (Nicole at Write Me a World) - Nicole talks about her process for world-building. She talks about a bunch of great details which can help you think about the background of the world you are creating for your story.

Additionally, here's a recap of the posts from this week on my blog:

"7 Things to Do When You Feel Like You're Losing Your Mind" - The last couple of months of the year can be a stressful time for lots of people. Students (and teachers!) have exams coming up to deal with, there are the holidays to prepare for, and so on. Writers who choose to participate in NaNoWriMo get to add an extra layer of pressure into November. In this post I talked about a list of things which you can do to try to decompress when stress (from writing or otherwise) feels like it's going to make you lose it.

"Dissecting the Short Story Preview and October/November Goals" - I announced the story for Friday's dissection and talked about the results of my October goals and my plans for November.

"Winning Prompt and Upcoming Publication" - Thursday, I announced the winner of my prompt contest. I've already started writing the story based off of David Powers King's prompt. Then I talked about my Kazka Press news and a bit of other nice news and what fantastic timing they had.

"Dissecting the Short Story: 'The Gap' by Mikal Trimm" - This week's dissection was done on a short from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine which struck me as being atypical for the publication.

Have a great week everyone!