Laini Taylor's Blog, page 6

Clementine, Crawling and Purring

Oh man. :-)

Super Random Joke :-)

I'm not a real jokey person, mostly because I can't remember jokes or tell them well, but heck, even I can type a joke. This is so random, I totally love it.

* * *

Every year, Joe takes a week during summer to relax at his friend's cabin in the Maine woods. One night after he's just arrived, he's sitting in the cabin when he hears a knock at the door. He opens the door and doesn't see anything--until he looks down. On the wooden porch he sees a small snail. Annoyed, he picks up the snail and th...

New Laini's Ladies

As I hunker down to a new batch of Laini's Ladies, it occurred to me that I probably didn't show you the last batch, which are available now HERE.

"When I have a little money, I buy books. If I have any left over, I buy food and clothes." - Erasmus

"There is nothing better than a friend . . . unless it is a friend with chocolate." - Charles Dickens

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough." - Mae West

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Berthold Auerb...

Clementine at Nine Months + My First Mother's Day!

Somehow it's been nine months already. Astonishing. And yet, in a way it feels like it's been longer than that. Memories of Clementine's newborn tininess are fading. Today I was holding her sideways across my body and I caught sight of us in the mirror and she seemed gigantic. She's grown so much, and every day now brings new developments. The motorcycle mouth sound (brrrrrffffffvvvvvvvv), like little boys make playing cars; the squiggling becomes a commando-crawl; maniac sleep rolling, so sh...

Writing about writing, and then ... driving to Seattle again!

So I'm giving a talk tonight to the Writing For Children program at University of Washington. Spoke to them last year too and what an awesome class! Since it's all new students this time, the teacher had invited me to reprise my same talk, which seemed like a sound plan to me. It's time-consuming, after all, to prepare these things. So last night I opened the file to go over it quickly in preparation . . . and, um, oops.

See, it's highly likely that everyone in this class will have JUST heard ...

Okay, awesome

I hesitate to give you this link, out of fear you will disappear into it and never come back here, but ... sigh. Take it and go with my blessing. But try to come back and visit me. Or, maybe I will run into you there and we can shake our heads in solidarity and go, "I know. Exactly." It's Timothy's Hallinan's amazing series of essays on Finishing Your Novel. I linked to it recently, but in such a way that you could gloss over it. Not so now. It's a must-read if you're learning how to finish a...

Thank you, Story Sleuths!

Wow, this is totally awesome. This amazing blog, Story Sleuths, run by Meg Lippert, Allyson Valentine Shrier, and Heather Hedin Singh, has devoted five posts to a study of Blackbringer -- this is the closest I have ever come to having my book taught in school. I mean, they really examine different elements of craft very closely and with examples, and as a writer it is such a thrill to have someone pay such close attention to my work--and to use it as a teaching tool. Wow! I get a glow reading...

Writing Quote of the Day

(And no, that does not mean I will post a writing quote every day. But I surely could. There are a LOT of writing quotes out there!)

"Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, Oh well, I'm going to put away the writing until my children are grown, then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing. If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous -- which is very different."

--Jane Yolen

Hm...

Sensory Deprivation Writing Chamber

"The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at the least, when a professional writer doesn't do anything but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it, he shouldn't try. . . . But he is not to do any other thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines . . . . Two very simple rules, a: you don't have to write. b: you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself."
-Raymond Chandler

How about that, writers? If you were locked i...

PLOT -- Part III: Structure

[Plot -- Part I: What is Plot?]
[Plot -- Part II: Character, Motivation, and Conflict]

Is structure the same thing as plot? Close. It's the way you organize your plot. I'm going to stick to super-basics here and talk about: the beginning, middle, and end, your basic three-act structure, which is as old as the dramatic arts, dating back at least to the Greeks. Even complex plots mostly fit into this basic frame, for the reason that it works -- it is the perfect frame for satisfying those basic r...