S.A. Swann's Blog, page 28

If you're thinking about TV writing. . .

There's a marvelous post over at Io9 that you really must read.  It's titled, "Inside the writers room: Top scifi TV writers reveal tricks of the trade," but it really isn't about genre writing, and it really isn't about tricks of the trade. What it is, is an in-depth exploration on exactly what the working environment is like in a scripted TV show. To anyone unfamiliar with that environment, especially someone with a connection to writing outside that realm, it's an eye-opener. I already ...

So, Tropes. . .

If you're a writer populating these here interwebs, and you don't know about the site TV tropes, you should do yourself a favor and rectify that right now.  What is it?  It is a wiki that deals with, well, tropes in fiction: character types, situations, plot devices and so on.  And, despite the name, it does so for all media.  While at first blush it might seem a bit fannish, it provides a rather exhaustive deconstruction of just about any narrative device you can think of, and probably a...

Kittens

Write to the hand. . .

I go on about plot and worldbuilding a lot, because those are my strengths.  Both are similar in that they're largely exercises in logic— taking a premise, either in the environment or the story itself, and just following the consequences to an inevitable conclusion. I tend to deal with most writing issues, from characterization to theme, the same way, taking some first principles and building, methodically and logically out from there. It shouldn't be necessary to say this, but that isn't ...

I finally saw the Lost finale

I can see why a lot of people would hate it.  But then, again, there are certainly arguments for what they did end up doing.

Me, I teared up during the episode, had a bit of a WTF when Christian opened up his mouth at the end, and spent a good long time afterward thinking that was so weak.  Originally, I was going to write a blog post about how I would have ended the whole thing better. . .  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn't giving the show and the writers...

And Summer also…

As a follow-up to the post where I built a bunch of raised boxes for the veggie garden. Here's the garden today:

And here are some planters with herbs, and some homemade earth boxes I made last year.

Whew, that was close…

In the interstitial time between finishing the Messiah draft, and working on the rewrite, I'm working on a few book proposals to shop around since I've become a free agent. One of those book proposals has a tentative title Timewalker. Which is all I'm going to tell you about it, for the time being. However, it is enough to let you know why I felt an unpleasant raise in my heart rate when I saw the following book reviewed on Dear Author:

Fortunately, aside from the time-travel aspect, and t...

Me, elsewhere

I melded my mind on the SF Signal blog again. My contribution re: underrated fantasy series:

Ok, I'm going to cheat a little here, because there was once a time when if you were talking a fantasy series, you were not talking "novels." From the pulps up through the 1970s, if you were talking a series of anything, you were likely talking about short stories published in the genre magazines. And, if you're talking overlooked work today, that whole class of fiction — from Jirel of Joiry, to...

A little reminder. . .

A little bit of a reality check for those of us who write about SF futures, or just think about the future in general. This snazzy 21st Century lifestyle we've become accustomed to is based on an extremely long supply-chain. Think of the support required for an iPhone to exist. (h/t Futurismic) You have mines, factories, server farms, copper an optical cabling, cell towers. . . every one of those disparate elements is subject to the whims of the real world; everything from political...

Awesome Awesomeness