Category Archives: Writing

The Last Word

Posted on Thursday, April 12, 2012 by Keith

Tom Scocca puts MS Word in it’s place: What makes Word unbearable is the output. Like the fax machine, Word was designed to put things on paper. It was a tool of the desktop-publishing revolution, allowing ordinary computer users to … Continue reading →

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Write Before you Write

Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 by Keith

A large portion of the work of writing a story, in any medium, is usually done before you even write the first sentence. I’ve learned the hard way that just having a good idea for a story doesn’t mean it … Continue reading →

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The Power of Names

Posted on Wednesday, March 14, 2012 by Keith

Everyone knows that Mark twain was really Samuel Longhorne Clemens. And really, if you were born with a name like that, why change it? There are several reasons to use a pseudonym: Anonymity (which goes right out the window if … Continue reading →

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A Microscope is also a Telescope, When Used Properly

Posted on Wednesday, February 1, 2012 by Keith

Over at Charlie Stross’ blog, Cat Valente is writing up storm. This particular tempest is a great swirling discussion about the genre definitions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but not in the old perennial argument about which authors used which … Continue reading →

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The Sandbox

Posted on Friday, December 30, 2011 by Keith

Over on his blog, John Rogers is schooling us in story mechanics: If you want to know what the creators intended a show to be “about”, you can usually go back and watch the last scene of the pilot.  In … Continue reading →

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Links for 12/19/11

Posted on Monday, December 19, 2011 by Keith

A few odds and ends making their way from the internet to my brain in the last week: >A list of defunct auto manufactures and the cool cars they used to make, mostly from the nineteen-teens. Bless Wikipedia editors and … Continue reading →

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Words, Words, Words

Posted on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 by Keith

So, the novel. As near as I can figure, after much dithering about with thorny plot issues and restructuring, plus a couple of wasted days in early November, my grand total word count for the end of National Novel Writing … Continue reading →

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As Goes Bella, So Goes the Nation

Posted on Friday, November 18, 2011 by Keith

Over at Goodreads, they’ve discovered something interesting about the readers of the Twilight books (click the link to see the infographic): There is no more divisive book on Goodreads than Twilight. It manages to top both our Best Books Ever … Continue reading →

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NaNoWriMo Update

Posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 by Keith

So. yeah. How’s your novel going? Hope you’ve been working on it harder than I have on mine. I had a little set back, in that i wasted the first ten days of National Novel Writing Month working on a … Continue reading →

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Countdown to NaNoWriMo

Posted on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 by Keith

Just a reminder that National Novel Writing Month starts 2 weeks form today. I alas will not be participating this year, at least officially, as I’m already about half way through a novel and don’t want to stop just to … Continue reading →

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