Sunday, July 15, 2012

Sunday Links: July 15th, 2012 Edition

Is it really possible that the typical summer break from school here in Ohio (and, I believe, much of the rest of the United States) is essentially half-over now? We're at the mid-point of July, that's for certain! Typically, I review my goal status at mid-month; since Mondays are #writemotivation days in July, my goal check post will be up tomorrow.

I had an extremely productive writing day Saturday along with a first for me. With some of my stories beginning to come off their exclusivity periods with their first publishers, they are available for reprints. Yesterday, I made my first submissions to foreign-language markets. There are some markets which will accept English-language submissions for translation; they often pay only in copies, but for a reprint and for the chance to see my story printed in another language, I'm okay with that. Douglas Smith has a nice list of non-English markets for speculative short fiction and that is what I used for my market research.

Speaking of links, below are the writing-related links I've collected this week which I thought would be good to share with others. If you've found some interesting links this week, I hope you will share them in the comment section below!

"10 Bruce Lee Quotes That Can Improve Your Writing" (J. W. Alden) - A collection of ten quotations attributed to Bruce Lee (though at least one of them struck me as being more commonly attributed to Ben Franklin) with notes on how to apply them to your writing. It's a great post with lots of wonderful food for writerly thought.

"Writing - The Type Who Sticks With It" (Elizabeth S. Craig at Mystery Writing is Murder) - How to identify the people who are likely to stick with an activity through the challenges it presents.

"Wendy's Novel Outlining Omnibus" (Wendy Wagner at Inkpunks) - A nice description of the process Wendy is learning to use for outlining novels. As someone who still finds longer-length stories a challenge to design and write, this was interesting reading.

"On Difficulties, the Evasion Of" (Carson Cistulli at The New Enthusiast) - I actually got to the post from the Twitter feed of a baseball writer. It's very brief, but I thought it was interesting. Sometimes we hear that we have to struggle for art and that if the words come too easily that we're not challenging ourselves or our readers enough. Maybe that's not always so.

Along with those links, here are the items I posted on my blog this week:

"Monday July 9th #writemotivation Update" - Monday's post covered a minor tweak to my Daily Writing Chain and then went through how I'm doing on working toward my goals for the month.

"'An Unsuitable Job for a Human' is Live at Nature.com" - Wednesday I linked to my most recently-published story and wrote a few notes on my blog about what its publication means to me.

"Inflection Points for Writers (and Characters)" - Thursday I wrote about little moments that have big impacts in our lives and in the lives of our characters.

Have a great week!

2 comments:

  1. Hey Michael, I seemed to have missed this post. Thanks for linking to my Bruce Lee entry! Glad you enjoyed it.

    Out of curiosity, which quote had you heard attributed to Ben Franklin?

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    1. Hi, J. W., thanks for stopping by!

      "If you love life, don't waste time—for time is what life is made up of." The wording is ever so slightly different (more modern, if nothing else), but it's very similar to Franklin's "Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of."

      http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/3055.html

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