Mur Lafferty's Blog, page 95

Links- advice for n00bs, new media, software and support

Meant to include this on the last post and forgot. So TWO blog posts today! W00t!

Excellent advice from Joanna Penn about What I Wish I’d Known Before Writing My First Book — (This inspired today’s Measurable Goals post, for the record.)Is anyone using the Atlantis Word Processor? It has a “publish to ebook” feature with the new update, and I’m curious how well it works. If you are using it, please let me know! (I’d test it, but it looks to be PC only, dangit.)More authors taking control of their

Measurable Goals

There’s one thing I never realized about this whole writing thing until- embarrassingly enough- this year. Whether you’re doing the “get started writing” thing or the “begin to get published” thing or the “alternate/indy/new media publishing” thing or even the “established writer veteran,” there is one thing you absolutely must have:

Measurable goals.

Having a clear goal in mind when you start any project is vital to its success. And it’s something I have lacked.

Sure, when I start a project, I v

Outlining

So here’s the deal. As you may have heard in I Should Be Writing #119, I’ve gotten a number of questions about outlining. I have decided to investigate other outlining methods than the snowball method- ALL FOR YOU. So shoot me your outline ideas/methods, or links to methods, and I’ll try them out. I have three personal projects this year, so I’ll try three different outlining methods and see if I can get some good outcome from them, reporting back to you.

So we have snowflake, what other outlini

I’m me. Be you.

I just sat down and read Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, by Hugh MacLeod, in one sitting. It’s a quick book to get through, and it has some very basic advice on creative living. But the biggest message I go out of the book is this simple thought:

I’m me. Be you.

The first part is so freaking hard for me to stick to. My writing career has taken a weird wonderful path that is so unlike how I thought it would. But even then, it’s treading a path that is at least parallel to authors

ISBW #119 – Are You a God? / Seth Harwood Interview

Once again we are proud to have GoTo Meeting as a sponsor this week! Get a Free 30-Day Trial!

[image error] We are also proud to be sponsored by JC Hutchins’ Personal Effects series, the podcast Sword of Blood is available free now, and the novel Personal Effects: Dark Art, launched this past week (order now!)

Note- I recorded this before I spent two weeks of hardcore writing and editing. I wrote 25,000 words in four days, and did basically nothing else. So I apologize for not getting this up until now.

00:07:

Titles

I hate hate hate coming up with titles. Hate it. Sometimes they come to me, but that’s very rare.

My favorite title is for my short story, I Look Forward to Remembering You, about time travel and how our main character hires someone to go back in time to change her past. So it fit. I feel like that was my ONE CLEVER TITLE I’ll ever get.

Playing For Keeps’ working title was Keepsie’s Bar. That changed when Cory Doctorow workshopped the first chapters at Viable Paradise and wrote “GET A REAL TITLE”

Don’t make hasty decisions

The more I deal with professionals in my career, the more I have to be vague. I’m not going to blog my rejections, or even who did them. It’s unprofessional, and if an agent/editor googles you and sees you talking crap about people who rejected you, you’re going to look bad.

If you and I were in a bar somewhere, I’d have no problem telling you anything going on. I just don’t want it in public, or searchable. Gotta be professional.

So with that said, yesterday I got a great disappointment. I was pr

Roaches Unite

I am a roach.

I may not impress you. The filth that I live in, and spread, is genre fiction. It’s ghetto fiction, it’s “why don’t you write something important?” fiction. Other insects—the delicate literary butterfly, the industrious nonfiction ants—look at me with disdain. Why write escapism? Why write about fantastical bullcrap?

The thing is, I am also the most persistent of the bugs. My persistence when it comes to my writing is vast. It can withstand you stepping on it, it can withstand a nucl

Support the Clarion Write-a-Thon

Back to editing the OMGDTN project. So quick blog post for the day.

K. Tempest Bradford is doing a write-a-thon to earn money for Clarion scholarships. I love this idea, and the Clarion foundation is a worthy charity to support scifi writers. I’ll be sponsoring, think you can donate five bucks or so? This is how writers help each other.

Writing prompt for June 9: Write a scene about the most selfless thing your main character has ever done. Now wonder how that colors the things they do every day.

Personal Effects: Dark Art Launches Today!

Frequent guest, sponsor and good friend JC Hutchins has his print debut hit the bookshelves today. Personal Effects: Dark Art is a novel, a transmedia experience, and alternate reality game. We’ve mentioned it before, but now you can see what podcasting novelists thinks about it.

As I said- in full disclosure, Hutch is a sponsor, and a friend, but I wouldn’t endorse this book as heavily if I hadn’t read an advance copy and think it’s worthwhile to read. It’s scary, touching, creepy, and fascinati