I'm absolutely drained tonight. Our oldest just finished up her fourth experience with the All-Ohio State Fair Youth Choir. The final concert lasted for two and a half hours and that didn't include the slideshow afterwards or the extended period where 200 high school kids who have spent 18 days living and singing together hug and cry and say goodbye. So if my links descriptions tonight are a bit shorter than usual, please excuse me.
But I will share with you one of my favorite songs that the AOSFYC did this summer, "Let the River Run." This isn't my video, but I'm glad to be able to share it all the same. Consider it a special link for this week!
With the fair and everything, I've had an especially hectic go of things this week, so my writing time each day has been fairly limited. Still, I've made progress on several things, getting critique feedback from two people on a story I wrote recently, and keeping busy with a variety of other writing activities. I also managed to write a relatively-lengthy story (for the time allotted) for this weekend's Liberty Hall flash fiction challenge. I'm happy with the story arc, though I suspect it's still rather rough around the edges. I'll look forward to hearing from the other competitors as to what their thoughts are on how I can improve it.
One last thing I'd like to draw my readers' attention to before I get to the rest of the links is the Kickstarter for Unidentified Funny Objects. In my position as one of the Associate Editors for this project, I've read most of the stories which are under consideration so far for the final Table of Contents. I think it's going to be a very fun anthology and I hope that people who are interested in humorous science fiction and fantasy will take a few moments to check out the Kickstarter and consider backing the project.
Now, without any more preliminaries, here are this week's writing-related links that I wanted to share with my readers:
"Your Emergency Minimums" (Daniel
Swensen at Sulrly Muse) - Daniel talks about the idea of having some baseline level of activity for things which are important to you (writing, exercising, etc.) which you commit to achieving no matter what else is going on in your life. It isn't necessarily something that you set at the daily level (after all, it's always possible for a 24-hour time period to be utterly upside down); you could set these minimums for a week or even a month. It's an interesting idea and another possible approach for people who are working at establishing routines in their life.
"Theme Parking Lot" (Nathan Crowder at Tales from the Ragged Edge) - Nathan talks about his thoughts on the use of theme in fiction. In addition to what he says about this, I think that there's a certain extent where theme can help a writer refine the "brand" they present to readers. I've started to see some themes occur with regularity in my own fiction, though I think I'm still at the stage where I'm refining my own sense of what I want to write.
"The Rule of Names" (Aliette de Bodard) - Aliette talks about the importance of getting names right when writing stories set in cultures with which you don't have familiarity. Interesting reading!
"Theme Parking Lot" (Nathan Crowder at Tales from the Ragged Edge) - Nathan talks about his thoughts on the use of theme in fiction. In addition to what he says about this, I think that there's a certain extent where theme can help a writer refine the "brand" they present to readers. I've started to see some themes occur with regularity in my own fiction, though I think I'm still at the stage where I'm refining my own sense of what I want to write.
"The Rule of Names" (Aliette de Bodard) - Aliette talks about the importance of getting names right when writing stories set in cultures with which you don't have familiarity. Interesting reading!
Along with those links, here are the items I posted on my blog this week:
"July #writemotivation Goals Wrapup and August Goals" - I reviewed how I did towards meeting my goals for the past month and defined my goals for August.
"'The Flower of Memory' is Live on Intergalactic Medicine Show" - A brief blog post about my science fiction short story published this week.
"Guest Editing the October Kazka Press Flash Fiction Contest" - Wednesday, I shared the news that I would be guest-editing the October edition (submissions due September 1-20) of the Kazka Press flash fiction contest.
"Podcast of 'An Unsuitable Job for a Human'" - Wednesday, I also found out that my story which appeared in Nature last month was chosen as their fiction podcast for the month.
"Why Write? -- Revisited" -Thursday, I revisited an early blog post of mine about why I write and mused on how that had changed (and not changed) in the past year.
Have a great week everyone!
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