Martha Wells's Blog, page 228

lucyplayscards asked: For some reason the only thing to ...

lucyplayscards asked: For some reason the only thing to come to mind is very random (and you can feel free to skip it, of course), which is: what is Florian's last name? For some reason I've been thinking about this forever, and I thought I may as well ask.

I know she had one, and I know it was in my notes circa 2002, but I can't find those notes. (I'm pretty sure they were casualties at least two hard drives ago.) I don't think I ever used it in the books.

thefourthvine asked: Okay, then I have

malimar asked: When you write a story about other people'...

malimar asked: When you write a story about other people's characters, do you do anything special to make sure you know the characters well enough to write them? Do you ever worry that you'll never know the deepest minds of the characters as well as their original creators do?

Well, when I wrote the SGA characters, I was already familiar with the world from watching SG-1 for seven or eight years, and I had already watched the first season of SGA without knowing I'd be writing a book for it. (I g

I got a few questions, so I'll be taking them in order, p...

I got a few questions, so I'll be taking them in order, probably doing one a day, through the weekend of WorldCon where everyone is having fun without us.

elanid asked: What is the first part of a story that typically comes to you, if there's any trend to it? And how much information do you need to have before you start writing?

I don't think there is any trend to it. Sometimes I have an idea of the main character I want to write, and I come up with the story and the world that that character wou

tinpra asked: How hard, or not, is it for you to do the f...

tinpra asked: How hard, or not, is it for you to do the first round of editing after you've finished a story? Do you follow any sort of schedule?

It's not hard at all, because I like doing revisions and editing. I usually edit and revise pretty continuously as I'm writing the first draft. After the book is done, then I'll do some revision based on the comments of the beta readers. With my last book, arcaedia gave me some great suggestions, and I did a revision to incorporate those. I don't f

Writing Questions

While everyone is having fun without us at WorldCon, let's do writing questions again: If anyone has a question about writing and/or publishing in general, or about my writing, comment with it here and answer it in a later post if I know what the answer is.

ArmadilloCon Schedule and Tattooed Librarians

Someone had asked, and yes, it's absolutely fine to friend me. I may not friend you back, because I don't do a huge amount of reading on LJ anymore. Oh, and my writing question posts are here.


ArmadilloCon Schedule August 14-16, in Austin, TX.

I'll be there Friday, but I'll be one of the teachers at the writers workshop, so I'll be in that all day.

Sa1100DW City Building
Sat 11:00 AM-Noon deWitt
R. Rogers, S. Lynch, M. Wells, S. Shinn, V. Docherty, J. L. Blaschke*
Creating a city that

WriterCon!

The trip to Minneapolis went pretty smoothly. The rain stopped outside of College Station, started again in Conroe but didn't last long, and I got to the airport in plenty of time. The flight was fine and mezzibelle found me at the baggage claim immediately, found chrisjournal who had also just gotten in, and went to the hotel.



After Mezz got me checked in, I was getting ready to go to the Thursday night party, and called home to tell morfin I had gotten in okay.

And he told me there was a che

Back from WriterCon. I had an absolutely fantastic time,...

Back from WriterCon. I had an absolutely fantastic time, and am now dead tired. I'll do a longer post about it tomorrow.

I'm getting ready to leave for the two hour drive to the ...

I'm getting ready to leave for the two hour drive to the Houston airport, to take a plane for WriterCon in MN. And we're having a thunderstorm. It's absolutely pelting down rain. The drought could have at least lasted until late this afternoon.

I'm not taking my laptop, because if something happened to it, I'd be screwed. (I had a friend get hers broken when someone knocked it off the table in the security line.) So I'll be offline until next week.

Cake!

We were talking cake on Facebook, so I thought I'd post this. My mother's chocolate cake recipe:

2 1/2 cups flour
4 tbsp. cocoa
1 cup sugar
1 cup mayonnaise (replaces the fat and eggs, makes the cake rich but not too sweet)
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup warm water

Combine all the ingredients with the soda dissolved in water. Mix, and pour into a greased and floured pan, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until done.

Fudge Frosting:

1 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
1/4 cup milk (I use 2% milk)
1/4 cup but