Sunday Links & The Week in #storyeachnight: April 8, 2012 Edition

Not a lot of news in my personal writing world to speak of. I continue working steadily on new stories. I wrote a first draft of one story earlier this week that I need to take through a reshaping second draft before it goes out anywhere. In fact, even though I spent a day doing revising on several stories recently, I still have a fair amount of editing and revising work which I need to get down to doing. I haven't yet given myself credit for a day on my daily writing chain by doing 45 minutes of focused revisions (as discussed here) so I should probably try to do that. I think I've got a bit of a mental barrier to using that as my writing for the day since I've spent so many days in a row writing something new every day. I might just have to pick a day and say "This day I'll do 45 minutes of revising at this specific time and that will be my qualifying work for the day." We'll see how it goes.

I'm still very hit and miss on #storyeachnight though I really do want to get back to reading a new story basically every day. Looking back at the week, I see I was even worse at it than I realized. I'm going to try to get back to reading a story close to every day, but we'll see how it goes.

Here are this week's entries:

4/1 - None
4/2 - None
4/3 - None
4/4 - "After" by C. L. Holland from DAILY SCIENCE FICTION.
4/5 - None
4/6 - "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" by Yoon Ha Lee from THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY 2011. An interesting tale of fantastic weapons, how they came to be created, and their impact on universes.
4/7 - None

Yeah... Definitely not living up to the "each" part of that recently.

Here are this week's links:

"MS Word Trick: Combining Changes and Comments" (Jami Gold) - For those who use Microsoft Word and get critiques/beta reader comments from multiple people, this tutorial on combining those comments into a single document could be very helpful. The general thrust, as well, that things which multiple readers express confusion or concern about should be real red flags for you as a writer is also good. Now, that doesn't mean that you should ignore every comment made by only a single critiquer -- after all, different readers have different strengths that they bring to the table.

"10 Secrets to Creating Unforgettable Supporting Characters" (Charlie Jane Anders at io9) - I thought there were some great suggestions in this list including anchoring them to a particular place (where appropriate of course) and introducing them first as a background character and bringing them to the foreground later.

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

"March Goal Wrap-Up, April Goal Setting" - Monday, I closed out March -- a decent month productivity-wise all things considered -- and set out my plan for April. I'm off to a good start on the April goals so far.

"Dissecting the Short Story Voting Has Begun" - Thursday's post set out the three stories for voting upon as part of the reboot of Dissecting the Short Story. Only two votes have been cast so far; I'm hoping to see more votes come in this week.

Best of luck to everyone with their writing goals for the week!