Andi Marquette's Blog: Andi Land, page 25

What the X-Files taught me about series

Hey, Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who engage in this American holiday.

I’m not really big on the holidays (as in Thanksgiving-Christmas), as some of you know, but I do enjoy the bit of time off I can take to catch up on my chillaxin’.

So I took yesterday off and basically freebased over half of Season 1 of the X-Files. I’m up to episode 15 (there are 24). It’s been years since I’ve watched the series, and though the costumes, hairstyles (and shut up, but I’m trying to bring back Mulder’s...

Quickie writing tips

Hiya, peeps–

Something cool that you still have a little time to follow is the Thursday Tweet-o-rama session with Sara Megibow, an agent with Nelson Literary Agency out of Denver (yay!). She does this thing on Twitter called 10 Queries in 10 Tweets. She Tweets 10 times about projects from the slushpile, letting followers know if it’s a yes or a no. She states the genre of the project, and a very brief reason as to why she’s rejecting it or accepting it. No identities are revealed in the making...

I, Cyborg?

I was listening to PRI’s “The World” this evening and there was a story called “Engineering Extra Senses” that both creeped me out and added all kinds of thoughts to the ol’ writing fodder files.

source (re-sized here)

Here. Go check it out for yourself.

Professor of cybernetics Kevin Warwick is fascinated with the merging of human and technology, which’ll open all kinds of different sensory realms for human beings.

“The only future I can see,” says [Warwick] at the University of Reading, England...

If at first you don’t secede: world-building

Hi, peeps–

A friend of mine sent me a link recently from a…ah…shall we say, more “conservative” website in which there was talk about certain southern states seceding from the U.S. I won’t mention the site or the states. Suffice it to say that if you play on TEH GOOGLE for any amount of time with the word “secession,” you’ll no doubt run across many sites whose visitors spend lots of time grumbling about such.

I don’t want to talk about the historical or political origins of such an argument, n...

Holiday fun around the bend

Hi, peeps–

Just wanted to alert those of you who are lesfic fans/readers that once again, fellow author Jove Belle and I will be doing a Holiday Hootenanny over at Women and Words this year.

For the uninitiated, the Hootenanny 2010 was a giant conglomeration of awesome-ness in which a whole bunch of lesfic authors put up copies of their books for holiday drawings. And WHOA Nelly did we have drawings! We gave away probably over 50 books over the course of 12 days (12 days of Xmas…get it?) and we...

Sense of place

Hey, kids.

It’s been a rough week for folks in the path of Sandy. I did a post about that at Women and Words. At the bottom of that post are links to organizations involved in relief efforts. If you’re so inclined, help as you can. Thanks.

Like millions of Americans, I watched storm coverage and it broke my heart to see so many houses lost, and to see the friends and families of those who did not survive. I’ve seen aerial photos that testify to what Sandy did to topography and landscape, and to...

Splitting tech-ache

Hi, kids–

I’m pretty good at maintaining my tech products. I take very good care of the tech in my life, which is why I still have a MacBook (purchased in 2005, just recently upgraded to Snow Leopard OS) that’s working fine, thank you. I also have a PC desktop, purchased in 2004. That was working okay until this past year when it became apparent that I would HAVE to get a different system because Microsoft decided to stop doing upgrades for the OS on that. Which, I’ll have you know, is XP. Oth...

On writing (other people’s) stories “authentically”

Hi, all–

I’m sure by now some of you have heard about evangelical Christian Timothy Kurek. He’s the guy who was homophobic and then decided to live life as gay for a year to find out what it was all about. He realized that his views were wrong, and then documented his year in a book.

Sounds like it was something that seems to have helped him figure a few things out. But on the other hand, he spent a year lying to LGBT people and to his family and friends from his real life. Which perhaps might...

Helpful writing links plus some other stuff

Hey, kids–

Tomorrow, join me and author Michael Chavez over at Women and Words. We’ll be chatting about his work and he’ll also be giving away a copy of his first novel, Creed. Come on by and hang out with us!

And other stuff I’ve found that I’m going to pass on to you:

Writing sidekicks and henchmen, by author Sophie Masson. I love to write strong secondary characters, so I dug this post. Read the comments, too, because there are other examples and tips in there.

Let’s talk (ha ha) about dialogu...

What I learned about writing from zombie plots

Hi, kids–

So I’ve been following the series Walking Dead, as some of you know. It’s a zombie apocalypse series, and what I find interesting about it is how interpersonal human drama plays out against a backdrop like this.

In that regard, Walking Dead is what I’d call a mixture of Lord of the Flies, The Road Warrior, and Night of the Living Dead. Because ultimately, what apocalyptic and dystopic scenarios come down to is the people dealing with them, and the power struggles within the groups of...