Before I get to the links, a quick reminder that I'm guest-editing this month's Kazka Press flash fiction contest with the theme of "Love Beyond Death." Submissions are open for several more days, through the 20th of the month. So, if you have a story of 713-1,000 words on that theme that you'd like for me to consider, now's the time to be submitting it. The stories I select will be part of the Kazka's October issue and I'll put a link up to them once they have been published on the first of the month.
Here are this week's links; I hope that some of them are useful to you. If you've come across an interesting link about writing recently, I'd be interested in hearing about it. Feel free to post it in the comments below.
"Speculative Fiction Tropes: Time Travel"
(J. W. Alden) - J. W. explores time travel in speculative fiction in this blog post, setting out some history of the trope and also providing some recommended reading. One of my all-time favorite novels, Octavia Butler's Kindred, is a time-travel book as is the audiobook I'm currently listening to (Tempest by Julie Cross).
"On Becoming a Worse Writer" (Rahul Kanakia at Blotter Paper) - Rahul talks about feeling like there are ebbs and flows in his writing quality, times where he's becoming -- at least for the moment -- a worse writer. This sort of ties in to something I've been dealing with relating to my own writing recently though, for me, I suspect it's more of a case of having reached the point where I'm acutely aware when something I've written isn't really "good" yet and finding that to be a stumbling block whereas in the past I would have plowed ahead.
"Racism in the Books We Write" (Justine Larbalestier) - In this post, Justine talks about the difficulty of dealing with issues of race in fiction and how "despite [our] due diligence, despite how careful we are, readers’ responses to our work are exactly that: their responses." As a result, things written with no malice or ill intent can be read as racist. Justine uses one of her own novels, Liar, as an example. On the one hand, the novel won the Carl Brandon Kindred Award given "to any work of speculative fiction dealing with issues of race and ethnicity." On the other hand, some readers said that they were hurt by what she had written. With multiple examples in speculative fiction of how this type of situation has been handled badly, it's very interesting to read Justine's take on this and try to learn from it.
"On Becoming a Worse Writer" (Rahul Kanakia at Blotter Paper) - Rahul talks about feeling like there are ebbs and flows in his writing quality, times where he's becoming -- at least for the moment -- a worse writer. This sort of ties in to something I've been dealing with relating to my own writing recently though, for me, I suspect it's more of a case of having reached the point where I'm acutely aware when something I've written isn't really "good" yet and finding that to be a stumbling block whereas in the past I would have plowed ahead.
"Racism in the Books We Write" (Justine Larbalestier) - In this post, Justine talks about the difficulty of dealing with issues of race in fiction and how "despite [our] due diligence, despite how careful we are, readers’ responses to our work are exactly that: their responses." As a result, things written with no malice or ill intent can be read as racist. Justine uses one of her own novels, Liar, as an example. On the one hand, the novel won the Carl Brandon Kindred Award given "to any work of speculative fiction dealing with issues of race and ethnicity." On the other hand, some readers said that they were hurt by what she had written. With multiple examples in speculative fiction of how this type of situation has been handled badly, it's very interesting to read Justine's take on this and try to learn from it.
Along with those links, here are the items I posted on my blog this week. I'm not including links from the two previous weeks but, like all of my posts, you can find them by going through my archived posts.
"End Hiatus, #writemotivation Check-In and Revised Blogging Schedule" - Monday was my first post-hiatus blog post and I caught up on several things including giving updates on my revisions to my blogging schedule. (The schedule revisions only affected my Write Every Day blog which will now have weekly posts on Wednesdays.)
"'No Way But the Hard Way' Is In Print" - Wednesday I put up a short blog post about my first story to appear in a physical book. I've had stories online and in one print periodical in the past year, but this is my first actual book publication.
"Fantasy and Science Fiction September-October 2012" - Thursday I posted my thoughts on all of the short fiction (11 stories in all) from the most recent issue of this magazine.
As of tomorrow, everyone but me in our house will be back to school for the fall. It's hard to believe that we're at this stage of the year already, but time marches on. Have a fantastic week and best of luck to everyone with your writing!
Thanks for linking to my blog post, Michael! I totally missed this post when it up. Much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteYou're quite welcome.
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