Sunday Links & The Week in #storyeachnight: April 15, 2012 Edition

The first link I want to draw everyone's attention to is Ken Liu's short story "Memories of My Mother." This will be the subject of April's Dissecting the Short Story post, which will appear on 4/26 or 4/30. So, if you want to be able to join in the discussion around this story, you could go ahead and read it now to be ready for that.

I've finally gotten back into the groove of regularly doing #storyeachnight. Here are this week's entries:

4/8 - "Amor Vincit Omnia" by K. J. Parker from THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, 2011 EDITION. Some rather fascinating worldbuilding in Parker's story, though not sure how I feel about the overall story arc.
4/9 -  "Older, Wiser, Time Traveler" by M. Bennardo from DAILY SCIENCE FICTION. I liked this story. Good voice and sense of where the story was going which, in a time travel story, can always be a bit tricky.
4/10 - "Final Exam" by Megan Arkenberg from the 6/12 ASIMOV'S. An interesting, very non-linear structure though I think I would have enjoyed it more if it had been a good bit shorter.
4/11 - "Waiting at the Altar" by Jack McDevitt from the 6/12 ASIMOV'S. Decent space exploration story though I enjoyed his recent "Maiden Voyage" (which featured the same characters) more. ("Maiden Voyage" was the subject of my January 6th "Dissecting the Short Story" entry.)
4/12 -  "Lethal Injection" by Kevin Levites from NOIR NATION #1. Seems like a lot of snake research went into this one. It had a very authentic feel.
4/13 - "The Green Book" by Amal El-Mohtar from THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY 2011. A great, rather short, story about an enchanted book and people who have interacted with it.

4/14 - "A Brief Respite From Eternity" by Alex Shvartsman from STUPEFYING STORIES 1.5. A nice flash fiction which worked for me even though it deals with a particular subject area I'm getting a bit weary of.

Now, here are this week's writing-related links:

"Drafting" (Milo James Fowler) - Milo talks about his first draft process. If you're having trouble getting stories through an initial draft, reading this and thinking about whether it's an approach you'd be comfortable with might work for you.

"9 Ways to Piss Off an Editor" (James L. Sutter at Inkpunks) - Consider this a "NOT To Do" list.

"On Pushing Yourself to Be Better" (Allison Winn Scotch at Writer Unboxed) - I'm a big believer that writers should be pretty much constantly striving to improve their craft. This is something I need to remind myself of, somedays, to not let myself sort of autopilot my way through a story because I'm sure it shows if I do.

"5 Tips For Writers on Planning Their Con Season" (Bryan Thomas Schmidt) - I got a bit of a disappointment recently. It looks like there's a fair chance I might end up needing to skip one of the main conventions I had planned to attend this year. It's for a good reason, so I can help a family member and a family friend with some activities of their own, but it's still a small bummer. Nevertheless, I plan to make it to at least one genre-related convention this year (Science Fiction or Mystery) and this article provided some interesting food for thought.

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

"Following Heinlein's Rules for Writers" - Monday I wrote about Robert A. Heinlein's famous rules for writers and discussed how well I feel I measure up to those rules.

"Dissecting the Short Story Update & Lucky 7 Novel Excerpt" - Thursday's post predicted the voting results for the Dissecting the Short Story poll and provided a small excerpt from my NaNoWriMo project "Adrift."

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