Mur Lafferty's Blog, page 80

The End In Sight

Guest blogger J.R. Blackwell is a writer who believes that people can change shape, size and minds.

For some reason, the process of finishing up the first draft of a novel is proving to be one of the most creatively rich times I've ever experienced. I have ideas for photo-shoots and short stories and graphic novels that obsess me every single day. I'm about five to ten thousand words away from the end of my zero draft, and I keep thinking about other, really cool ideas.

But I'm not going to...

Addendum: You are required to suck

I've been saying for years that you should allow yourself the freedom to suck at writing. With the freedom to write horrible things, you get discouraged less, you learn faster, and you understand the difference between good and bad writing.

But lately I've been thinking that that needs to be changed. Because, at the beginning, you are going to suck. The "allowing" part means you keep going instead of stopping and wailing that your perfect idea is crap on the page. This is not an insult...

Jonathan Coulton and the Forced March (An ISBW Audio Treat)

I got a chance to interview Jonathan Coulton before his Raleigh show last Friday. I hadn't talked to him since '07 when he came through town backing up John Hodgman, and he was the opening band for Paul and Storm. Things have changed a bit since then.

I asked him about Thing a Week, when he was making a song every week for a year, and how it affected him. I was going to blog about it, but then I thought, why not just drop that snippet of the interview into the feed? (the interview was not for ...

Heroes

Guest blogger Alasdair Stuart grew up on a rock in the middle of the Irish sea, a fact that not only instilled in him the ability to create his own fun but also provided him with a bolthole in the event of a zombie uprising.  He's grateful for both those things.  Alasdair hosts Pseudopod, edits Hub Magazine , writes for the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game and lives near one of the greatest coffee shops in the country.  He also, secretly, would quite like to swap places with his fictional...

Are Location-Based Services a Step Back in Online Friending Behavior?

I am obsessed with Foursquare.  I'm also a (really tough!) female living in a reasonably dangerous city.

Neither of these facts are any kind of secret to anyone who knows me personally, discovers my Twitter account, friends me on Facebook, subscribes to me on GetGlue, or stands behind me in line at any coffee shop (someday I will be mayor of one that will give me free coffee).

But this is the kind of information that would freak my mom right out. Using a service to tell people where I am...

All Write! #16 – An Impassioned Defense

Follow your dream

I'm going to be crazy here. I'm going to go against nearly everything I've said before. I'm going to sound like I am being negative. But I'm not.

So many people say "follow your dreams" and "you can do anything." Which, as we all know, is impossible. I'll never play for the NBA since I:

Am not male.
Am five foot five.
Am 36 years old.
Haven't played basketball since 8th grade.

Something I've been doing this month with my time off (besides work on getting Escape Pod back online) is...

New editor gig

It's funny; with two blogs I weigh which of my personal news should go where. And I realize I made this announcement at the Murverse, but not here at ISBW, where it's also relevant.

I've hinted at secret projects and why I need time off in May, and I can finally announce why: I am the new editor of Escape Pod.

Steve Eley, the man who built all of the Escape Artists podcasts from the bottom up, is leaving his role as editor, and I am taking over. I have loved Escape Pod since the early days...

What do you want?

What do you want? (from PlanetZhadum.com)

(Non-Babylon 5 geeks, just keep reading along, the picture is a geeky in-joke that has no relevance to this post beyond the fact that it amuses me.)

As I take this month off for a brief breather from podcasting (more of a break than I expected; I'll talk about that in a moment) I am wondering about the direction of this site and podcast. The podcast is almost 5 years old, and a close friend asked me the other day, "What is left to cover?" Which got me t...

Nicest author in the world makes money. WORLD OUTRAGED.

The latest kerfuffle in the writing world involves one of my favorite writers, and money. Tobias Buckell, John Scalzi, and Neil Gaiman himself have blog posts about the incident and I'm not going to duplicate their efforts. Go read them and then come back here. If you want the bullet points, it's come out that Neil Gaiman got $40K to speak at a library. Apparently a newspaper would have rather spent that money on a stadium. I guess encouraging readers (and writers!) with a visit from a NYT...