Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 2

Is Slipstream Just a Fancy Word for Voice?

by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Originally published in IROSF. April 2005

 

Slipstream, slipstream, we all got slipstream.  It’s been a hot topic these last few years, at Tangent Online[1], in the pages of Asimov’s[2], and elsewhere in print and across the Internet.  What is slipstream and why do we care?

We have Bruce Sterling to thank for the nomenclature.  In his seminal essay on the topic in SF Eye #5, the Bruce defined the new genre as follows:

This genre is not “category” S...

Breaking the Success Barrier

by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Originally published July 2006 in IROSF

A funny thing can happen to writers on the way to the post office.  We become afraid of what we can do.  People freeze up in all sorts of ways — cat waxing, rejectomancy, pathological revision, drunkenness, sheer wall-eyed panic.  Some folks talk about fear of failure, but if we truly feared failure, we wouldn’t be writers.  Writers are those people who’ve mastered failure, gotten very good at it even, and kept on pluggi...

Anatomy of an Idea

By Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

“Where do you get your ideas?”

This is of course the classic eye-rolling writer question.  In speculative fiction, the question can run much deeper than it does in other genres.  There are as many ways to address this with serious intent as there are writers to address, but we have chosen two main aspects to emphasize.

Writer shopping for ideas at the store in Poughkeepsie

The first aspect of this question is a matter of definition.  What is an idea?  Wha...

Notes to an Aspiring Author

By Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake

This article was originally published on IROSF in January 2006.

Recently we talked about some of the things editors in our field care about, how they are looking for the strange, the different, the new — and not in the cover letter.  Now we’re going to talk about some of the things writers care about, the aspiring author in particular.  We’re going to say some things aspiring authors probably don’t want to hear, and we’re going to say some things that they’ve...

Editing the Wild Anthology: What Writers Wish They Knew

by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

Continuing my series of articles I wrote with Jay Lake a couple of decades ago. This one was originally published in IROSF in November 2005.

Consider the poor editor, slaving away at her overheated desk, surrounded by piles of manuscripts.  She finds herself amid vales of verbiage, stacks of sonorous prose, wondering where and how she’ll pull together a meaningful selection of work that won’t get her drummed out of the Editor’s Club, bar privileges revoke...

True Facts About the Art and Craft of Writing: adagio for two voices in dissonant agreement

by Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake

Originally published on IROSF, December 2005

Foreshadowing:

Jay recently said the following on his LiveJournal page:

“Span of control” is the story size (and shape) that I can hold in my head and manage organically, to produce a competent (or better than competent) first draft with a strong, consistent voice. As opposed to work outside my span of control, which tends to be far more laborious, requiring multiple restarts and editing sessions and considera...

Lazarus Rising: Bringing my Blog back to Life (Hopefully)

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on this blog. I know blogs are a bit old-fashioned, but I’m not exactly young anymore, and I’ve always liked blogging more than other forms of social media. So then why did I quit? I’m not quite sure. At least in part it was general frustration with the way my writing career was going, and the feeling that blogging is useless. But I don’t do any other social media either. So anyway, I’m back!

I’ll be starting with a project I promised quite a few years...

“With Fear for our Democracy, I Dissent”

Chuck Wendig wrote a great blog post about the Supreme Court decision making criminal actions by US presidents legal.

Go. Read it.

“With Fear for our Democracy, I Dissent”

Ygerna made it into the top 100 free on Amazon!

It’s getting late here in Central Europe, so I may end up missing the best slot Ygerna manages to take, but right now it’s ranking #93 in free books on Amazon!

We will have to wait and see whether the expense to get it there was worth it, but it’s still really cool to get this kind of slot again, after a long marketing hiatus.

The best science fiction stories with thought-provoking twists on Shepherd.com

I was recently asked by a new book recommendation site, Shepherd.com, to create a list of recommended books to go with my SF novella, Looking Through Lace.

I decided to create my list around my favorite “holy crap!” SF novels and short stories, and names it “The best science fiction stories with thought-provoking twists.” You can check out my list here.

If was tough trying to choose only five, but still two books by Ursula K. LeGuin are on it.