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Five Ways Social Media Can Destroy Your Writing (and, Potentially, Your Career)
Ah, social media. You can’t cross the street any more without having it cross your consciousness (I wonder if there’s a check-in here!). And as useful as social media can be for us writerly types, I guarantee you for every pro there is a serious and potentially hazardous con. Having written before on some of the reasons I love Twitter for writing, I thought I’d share five ways that social media can, you know, go all Cthulhu on your writing rather than foster it. 1) You drive yourself to distraction. This is perhaps the most obvious pitfall of social media. It’s damn distracting. There’s plenty of time to talk about…
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Home Again, Home Again
Home from Dragon*Con as of this Monday, but life has been, as usual, too hectic for a moment’s rest. That, and the entire house is sick one way or another here. So I’m only now just getting down to reflect on the last weekend. General consensus is that I don’t know if I’m cut out for Dragon*Con in the long run. There are just too many people, events are too disorganized, and just getting from one hotel to another is a tour de force. The most wonderful moments I had were spending time with friends and other writers (including a very memorable nightcap atop a rotating bar with Ann and…
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arthuriana, blog, editing, fantasy, glassmere, peter of windbourne, pilgrim of the sky, queen of none, steampunk, the gnome and the necromancer, ward of the rose, WIP, writing
Prosaic Analysis Paralysis
In which I think aloud for a few paragraphs… pardon the navel gazing. The burden of words. It’s quite something, I tell you. And at the moment I’m finding it to be on the verge of utterly overwhelming. I have all these stories, all these books and novels and ideas, and instead of a calm, steady stream (the way I’ve written for the better part of the last five years) it’s a frozen lake. A frozen lake filled with strange faces and whispers under the icy surface, all jumbled together, staring at me, challenging me. And I’ve got analysis paralysis. I have too much to work on, so much so…
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Looking for Lucy Pevensie
I don’t think I can ever express just how how hard I tried to get to Narnia. Sure, some people read books and are inspired by them; they’re influenced by them; they are changed by them. It’s normal. It’s part of the wonder of, especially I think, fantasy literature. That world just beyond the mirror, that glen just over the bend that blinks in and out of existence. It reflects the worlds we want to exist, lingering just there on the edge of what we see. Except, for most of the fifth grade, I didn’t just like the Narnia books: I believed them. I hoped in them. I wrote strange…
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Maelstrom! Mayhem! (Okay, not really. But it is a good title.)
I love the word maelstrom. I also love the word mayhem. They are related and have a certain alliterative delight, don’t they? Sure, this is just an update post and nowhere near as exciting as the last post. But yay! Updates. At any rate. I am currently in the middle of a few fun things. I may have mentioned this on Twitter, or other places, but I’m now a fiction editor over at Bull Spec, the publication which in many ways is responsible for a great deal of the success I’ve seen in the last few years. I truly don’t know what folks do without robust writing communities like we…
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July July July
Life has been spinning by at a trajectory altogether too fast for me these days, but that’s what happens when you smoosh an actual career in between being an author, a blogger, a mom, a sister, a wife, and an editor. It’s really unfair of me to complain, since it’s the bed I’ve made, but thankfully our summer beach vacation is looming just around the corner and I am looking forward to a week with as little technology as possible, and basking in the sun reading books and maybe (just maybe) doing some writing. Which is not to say I haven’t been writing, only that the writing is slow. Instead…
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Thoughts on 30: Goals for writing, goals for life
I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to tell stories. But I can tell you when I started taking telling stories seriously (well, not entirely seriously… thankfully). I was 25, had just had a baby, and went through the ringer with postpartum depression. On the other side of that, a truth glimmered. I don’t mean to be hokey or corny, but in the space of a few weeks it became abundantly clear that writing, being a writer, required my attention. It was one of those things that made me, and something I’d been ignoring a long time in favor of more acceptable aspirations. I’ve talked about this…
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April… May… June?
Yes, officially I suck as a blogger. But hey: I’ve been at this a while. Sometimes a gal needs a break. I’ve been away long enough that WordPress now has a totally different dashboard, it’s almost June, and I’ve been to San Francisco and back. There are some big, awesome things going on. So I thought I’d let you know about them instead of, you know, just keeping them to myself. (Bad author. Bad!) ConCarolinas – I am a guest! I am speaking on four panels: Changing History at 11:00 am on Saturday at University Ballroom A, Political Intrigue at 1pm in the same room on Saturday, Panel of Ice…
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Marching on…
Oh, look, I’m starting this post with a pun about the month of March. But yeah. Looks like I went the entire month of February without posting a single darned thing to my blog. Apologies. Sort of. We’ve moved, I’ve been working full-time, and life in general has been speeding by so fast I’m having a hard time keeping track of time, let alone posts. I’m not really apologizing, because it’s not like I’ve neglected on purpose. Anyone who’s sent me email in the last month will probably attest to the fact that response times aren’t really my strength at the moment! But I’m getting there. Anyway, in writing news: …
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Adventures in Editing
Last night I turned in my book to my editor, Kate, over at Candlemark & Gleam. This is a first for me. You know, editing a novel that will actually get into the hands of readers. I’ve spent lots of time editing my own books, and I generally enjoy the process quite a lot. I know many writers find it tedious and awful. And it can be, absolutely. But I have a good feeling about this draft; the second I sent it off to Kate, I missed it. As I saved the file, I thought of the last two years. In late 2008, I completed the first draft of Pilgrim…
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A Whole Lot of Publication Goin’ On
Well. I have lots of things to share. Enough things to share to warrant a list. Yes, a list. With numbering and everything fancy. So: behold! 1.) Currently you can find me in the premiere issue of Fantastique Unfettered. My story is called “Without a Light”. It’s a story about deadly desire, set in early 90s New England backdrop where, well, weird stuff happens. Like that Stephen King guy, I grew up in the frozen wilderness of New England, Massachusetts to be specific, and it’s the first story I ever set there. I think it definitely owes a lot of its tone to King’s short stories, which I devoured as…
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2010: A Year in Review
In many ways, 2010 can be described in terms of loss. We started off by (accidentally…) losing our home. Then I lost the ability to write for a while, and spent the first eight months trying to figure out what the hell to do with myself. Along the way I lost 40 pounds (10 or so of which were surgically removed). Michael lost his job. Things felt pretty bleak there for a while, you might say. But then, in spite of that, the year can be measured in terms of gain. I gained a new novel, Indigo & Ink, which I wrote during the pain period and, in my mind…
