S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 231

Wishing You

If you're feeling lucky today, here are some contests you might check out:

AOL is giving away three Asus - Eee PC Netbooks in their Feeling Lucky? Sweepstakes. Entrants must be U.S. citizens 18 years or older, and to win must send AOL a brief review on a favorite product or recent purchase. Contest runs from March 15 - April 11, 2010; see sweepstakes page for more details and official rules.

Agent Nathan Bransford is holding a NCAA-winners-brackets-challenge. I don't follow sports so I don't...

Character Craft

Because I can never do anything without thinking of how it applies to writing, I used my quilt guild's latest challenge (show a single block design in four different applications) to help me think through and work out a characterization for my next novel.

It all began with a watercolor I painted one morning while thinking about recovering from a tough situation in life. We've all been there, and I think once the disaster is over all we wish for is some measure of calm or quiet so we can sort o...

Take Ten

Ten Things That Are Yours for the Taking

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Cool Reader is "an e-book viewer" that "understands a number of text document formats. Fully customizable palette, text reformatting with any font size, font antialiasing, extra smooth scrolling and a lot of other features turn reading into a pleasure. Read Aloud function saves your eyes" (OS: Win9x/ME/NT4.0/Win2K/XP)

eLIB ...

3 Contests

Author Doug Clegg has a new contest to celebrate the upcoming release of his novel Neverland that will snare one lucky reader their choice of a Kindle or a Nook e-reader; get the details, rules and enter by May 15th, 2010 over at his web site.

Parsec is holding their 15th annual short story contest for SF, fantasy or horror stories with a theme of "The Color of Silence." Length is 3.5K max, three prizes of $200.00 (1st place), $100.00 (2nd) and $50.00 (3rd) and may be considered for publicati...

Hair is the New Weird?

For the second time in as many weeks I've stumbled across a photo of a debut author (who shall remain nameless) with weird hair. I know that "I don't give a damn" and "I don't own a comb" hair is often fashionable (yes, Kate Moss, I reference your mop) but this isn't the usual clueless-writer-can't-figure-out-a-hairstyle look. This is contrived weird. Deliberate bizarre. Look-at-me strange.

Is this the latest trend in objectifying authors? I never got the memo.

I admit, weird hair is not ...

Drafty

I have been rifling through the blog archives to find some old lists, and decided to check on how many draft posts I still have saved from over the years but never got around to publishing. Altogether: 156, or an average of about 30 every year since I started PBW. Does that sound like a lot to you guys? Seemed like a lot to me.

I started to go through them, and found that most were satires that needed polishing, rants that ought to be deleted permanently, or partial ten lists that needed to be...

3 Magazines

I've been very good about controlling my addiction to magazines, and have reduced my subscriptions to just five that I can't live without, which is much better than the twenty-seven I was subscribing to a few years ago.

As a reward now and then for my good behavior I let myself buy a few from the racks; here are the latest three I thought might be of interest to other writers (not that I'm trying to get you hooked or anything):

The March/April '10 issue of Archaeology magazine has some particu...

Infectious Ten

One thing that caught my eye from that writing rules article I mentioned yesterday was a comment by P.D. James who stated that we should be discriminating about what we read because Bad writing is contagious. I can't say if I agree with that or not -- it invites snobbery, and badly-written books often cheer me up immensely -- but it did make me wonder what other writer cooties might be out there waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting storyteller.

Over the years I have noticed some faddish-type ...

Hi-Speed Art

I've never watched a YouTube video I was tempted to actually embed on the blog, until this one: High-speed video shows Orbit books' designer Lauren Panepinto creating cover art for Gail Carriger's Blameless in 155 seconds -- and a warning for those of you who are at work, it runs with background music (link and video found over at SF Signal.)

Rulers

The Guardian has an interesting article listing ten rules for writing fiction from Elmore Leonard and various other important authors. Richard Ford's terse but funny list (scroll down) is my favorite, but I noted a couple authors couldn't come up with ten rules; one lady only offered three (invoking that quotation about there being three rules for writing books, but no one knows what they are.)

I don't agree or disagree with any of the rules listed; I question the point of listing rules for wr...