Safeguard the digital sovereignty of your writing.
When using cloud storage, do not rely on companies based in countries you do not trust or know the laws of. These laws might obligate them to break the privacy of your data.
Make a conscious and informed decision on how to handle your data. You put your heart and soul into your writing, so please don't just click accept. 💜
This is a very good comic, and it describes every author (or #artist) who is unsure of themself. Don't let this be you!
Complete stories (your vision) regardless of the merit you see in them.
Start a next one. Full stop. Then another.
Complete and send out more stories even if some editor (or commenter) doesn't buy or like them.
It's all practice, every single failure or not-good-enough. Practice makes you better, whatever they think, or you think. Keep practicing.
Take from criticism only whatever helps you identify or fix problems; reject being put in your place or ridiculed. It's practice. Your art is unique to you. Be truthful with yourself, though.
Keep starting and completing stories. Statistically, some will be good—and you will start to recognize the wheat in the chaff.
Their first stories weren't fabulous. Neither may be yours. The difference? They kept on starting, completing, sending (or posting), until they found success. Let that be you.
Please remember: #boostingIsSharing and boost to give others a moral boost.
While and whilst. Not looking the usage up and I know the latter is archaic, but...
I use while to state something happened within the same time span. I use whilst to introduce a time span or something asserted (usually as true) followed by another clause that what happened in the time span or something important about what happened because of the assert.
Whilst Feliz would easily pass as a Kenyan woman cosplaying an elf with cyan-dyed skin—she bled copper—her flying saucer pilot was a whole different can of worms. The dragon-humanoid groused, arms crossed. "I hate wearing clothes."
I appreciated he did anyway. A lot. At the West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval we were going to, they'd likely appreciate if he didn't. A lot.
#PennedPossibilities 323 — What's a piece of advice for writers that you listened to and are glad for?
An Australian author, Lucy Sussex, told us at Clarion West 1998 to be shameless in promoting ourselves. Being a shy person, networking and promotion has been a heavy lift, but I'm working on it and I know it's going to help. Mastodon: ☑️
#PennedPossibilities 322 — What piece of advice, as an author, did you once receive but hadn’t followed? Looking back on it now, you might wish that you had.
Advice: Don't only write novels. Write lots of shorter pieces.
When I started I saw that you could only make a living if you sold novels, so I wrote novels. That completely discounted the fabulous practice you get completing lots of smaller stories. Completing a novel takes lots of time and there's a mounting anxiety that in the end the plot will fail or no publisher will be interested. Yeah, true with short fiction, but the investment is far lower (or should be if you're doing it right). There used to be lots of magazines you could sell short fiction to... for pennies a word, but it was something, and it offered a chance to build a brand name and a following. Such notoriety could help you sell novels, too.
Someone is either selling pirated copies of my book, or they're trying to scam people using my name and book. They even uploaded it under the name "River Hopkins" instead of "River J. Hopkins."
Can y'all please report the seller? This is the link. They're selling it for $14.99, and there's absolutely no way they have new copies for that price.
#WordWeavers 2405.19 — How did you settle on your MC’s appearance?
Historically, I wrote my characters such that I found them attractive. I don't do that anymore.
Sometimes I don't have control, except for hair styles and clothes, or the lack thereof. The story or character may have certain in-the-moment requirement, like when the MC needed to train in an almost all-male fight gym as a prizefighter (she'd later win a championship). Of course she had tailored pink and black gym wear made of technical fabric that outlined every curve—which proved interesting.
These days I do the best not to assign an appearance at all, instead keeping things vague and sticking to describing only what's absolutely necessary. My experiences with publishers is that'll they'll ignore your descriptions for cover art and promotion anyway. In any case, doing this allows the reader to imagine someone they would find attractive(†). The MC in the current WiP is described physically only as tall, shy, so beautiful that both sexes fall for her, and that she has "winter eyes," whatever that is. In the other story, the only thing I'm settled on is described by the devil-girl something like this:
"Take two finger length pieces of rusty rebar, sharpen one end, bend it ninety degree, and stick one above each temple, pointing backwards. Makes wearing hats problematic. Yeah. Gets messy when they try to grab you by the head in a fight, especially if it sticks in..."
She's also describes her very olive complexion; she's mentioned green eyes in a mirror and red hair everywhere. It could easily change in revision.
(†) A recent writer's prompt asked about my target audience. Can I say "imaginative?"
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9 Nbr 18 — Have you written sections where the action occurs against the clock? How did you do it?
My current story segment in serialization takes place over a very short time period, after the last third of the previous story taking place between dusk and dawn. The other story I am working on is a three act story, each act taking place over very few hours.
Writing stories in compressed time isn't much different than writing stories that take place more episodically over longer periods of time. In both cases, I write about what is important for the character and how they deal with events. An example may help.
In the serialization (obviously spoilers if you know which story I'm referring to), the MC realizes that though the leader has left on a military adventure to handle a "guerrilla insurgency," she sees evidence that same foe may attack the capital city. In theory, she's politically second in command. In practice, she has no real power. How she spends that day scheming and conniving with only a title to get a single frigate on patrol drives the story and the clock. It starts with a PTSD episode where she realizes she may be responsible again for innumerable deaths without the power to prevent them, then her working every contact she knows, butting heads with the generals who discount her experience running a crime syndicate (briefly), convincing a discriminated against officer who wants to accept discharge to instead command a museum-piece frigate, getting into a bloody fight with the XO, avoiding what the reader will see as assassination attempts, and it just gets worse with her love interests (plural!) pulling at her heart.
All in 12 hours. Tick-tock! That's one day of three days of escalating existential threats. The fourth day's events take place over one hour, which is about the time it would take to read.
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 9 Nbr 12 — When does AI cross the line between helpful tool and problematic tech for writing and publishing? CW: Some sarcasm and cynicism.
When? That happened a few years ago. All over the web. Whether you realize it or not, writers are being supplanted in most all minor writing jobs on lots of lesser and not so minor websites. Have you noticed that some stories are circular, seem to be written by authors of questionable fluency, miss a glaring argument or get a fact wrong, and in the end really make no good points or teach you anything? They seem to regurgitate what you've seen elsewhere?
Yep. AI written.
AI's a free tool! Managers love free. Let those freelancers go; just write some good prompts. So many good articles (likely AI written) to teach you how! All we need is good clickbait headlines, anyway. Feed the search engines! Serve up those display ads nobody clicks. Get us those micro-cents per page view.
Riiiight.
Sheesh. This Rubicon... Has... Been crossed. Mostly. Some have tripped. Many have drowned.
What I'd really like is for AI enhanced software to notice little things like misusing led and lead, finding missing words, pointing out when I leave out the 'nt in wouldn't changing the meaning of everything I wrote, even capitalizing based on context when dictating... thus and such. Yeah. Too difficult.
I won't repeat what everyone else is saying. Yep. True all that. It's all wrong headed at the moment and if you don't know how to write OR you could do it yourself if you weren't soooo lazy, #AI's just going to make you into a fool.
You get to make yourself into a fool in front of a publisher only once.
I love sharing some of my author friends with y'all. Check out Geoff Habiger & Coy Kisee
Fantasy, Paranormal
The writing duo of Geoff Habiger and Coy Kissee have been life-long friends since high school in Manhattan, Kansas. (Affectionately known as the Little Apple, which was a much better place to grow up than the Big Apple, in our humble opinion.) We love reading, baseball, cats, role-playing...
So, #Scrivener on the Mac is telling me that the project I'm working on the iPad and iPhone isn't a valid project. This is not how I wanted to spend my day...
#BOTD Angela Carter, award-winning author, poet & journalist. Women are front and centre in her gothic horror and magical-realist tales, which broke taboos with their depictions of sexuality and graphic violence. Well-known works include The Bloody Chamber and The Magic Toyshop. #horror#author#books#bookstodon
#PennedPossibilities 305 — Are there any characters of yours that you wound up HATING once you were finished with a story or WIP?
Taking a cue from @floofpaldi on how to answer this one, I have characters that are HATEFUL but none that I hate. I'm not to a Conan Doyle level that I can hate a character so much that I want to kill off my Sherlock Holmes.
Occasional hateful characters are great fun to write and pit against my MC. She ticks off one misogynist prizefighter during a press interview where her trainer presents her as a contender. An off-handed remark. He becomes her boogeyman, but he's stupidly angry, obviously uses steroids, blurts racist epithets, and gets used by others as muscle. The time he attacks her on a crowded public street, she manages to get him to trip into traffic where he breaks his legs. She walks off with her "Starbucks" she'd put down on a newspaper rack to deal with him.
Another time he ambushes her in a quiet neighborhood midday when nobody is around. His first punch to the head renders her unable to use magic part of her martial art and leaves her stumbling. He fights only with brawn. He wants to kill her. How could you hate a character on character setup like that?
She defeats him with a child's wooden pull toy. Anymore would be spoilers.