meridian_rose

The Stages Of National Novel Writing Month
"You need to prepare for NaNoWriMo, even if you’re not the one writing."
Fun article with lots of gifs, the usual Buzzfeed style - I'm dreading the halfway mark myself and it was nice to see that everyone knows and fears it!

Some recs today to help you get ready and excited for NaNoWriMo.

If you haven't started planning yet, and don't where to start, I highly recommend Max Kirkin's How to Plan a Novel. A non-proscriptive brainstorming session that helps you get started. It emphasises the importance of finding your enthusiasm, developing and following the characters as opposed to a strict plotline, and gives you some tools and tips that might work for you.
It's good to know I'm not the only one who listens to music and imagines music vids/fanvids/trailers of the fiction and characters I'm working with!

Worried about getting all those words written? Rachel Aaron's How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day might be helpful. At that rate you'd complete NaNoWriMo in five days!
Seriously though, there is a lot of pre-planning involved and if you're more of a pantser you might not find the process as useful as if you prefer a more coordinated approach. Plus it requires temporary sacrifices – think about how people are describing their preparation for NaNo, such as cleaning the house now because nothing non-essential will not get done during November!
The approach that works for Aaron is to step away from the computer and make handwritten notes about what the scene about to written consists of. This is coupled with some research about how you write – when and where do you achieve your best wordcounts? Find out and use that knowledge to plan your writing. Finally, there's a focus on enthusiasm, something echoing Max Kirin's advice. You have to love this story, you have to get excited about it. The words will come more easily if you're in your optimum workspace, knowing what you want to write, and you're excited to do so.

I've seen lots of advice about gearing up for NaNo and things like "talk in the NaNo forums" and "make a playlist" to get you enthused. Amanda McCormick's article NaNoWriMo Tip #5 – Get Hyped! gives five suggestions to get you started.

As I said before, I'm not used to this level of planning and I'm still struggling to pin down some of the details. But some of the characters and scenes are very clear to me and I'm making notes before I forget the details. I'm hoping that keeping these in reserve and not letting myself write them yet will let them grow, ferment, brew, and that, in November, I'll be anxious to write out the full versions of the scenes.


If you want to be writing buddies I'm meridianrose.

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This article was crossposted from my wordpress blog and linked/promo'd at Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr; comments/likes/reblogs, etc at those sites are much appreciated.

source:swankivy
Relevant right now.

I've posted a mini review of, and link to, an article over at the dryspell : http://dryspell.dreamwidth.org/2932.html
If you're not sure what the comm is about, the profile explains.
The article itself is How to get back to writing

I've let myself get behind, and there's over two months worth of links here, so it's longer than usual. But given how some of my Tumblr posts have zero notes (remind me how tagging your posts is guaranteed to get a Tumblr audience unlike the "dead" LJ?) I'm keen to showcase them here too, and I always like to share links to articles I've read that have stood out for me.

This Show Reblogged gifs from "The Flash", featuring the father-son type relationship between Barry Allen and Joe West to which I added some commentary about how I love all the characters and this relationship.

Lewis: The Moonbeams Brief review/commentary added to a reblog about an episode of "Lewis" featuring Tom Riley as an artist who appears to be on the autistic spectrum.

Overnight Everything I Loved Was Gone I posted a link to a longer excerpt which was originally posted here and added some commentary of my own about the Internet and public shaming.

Why Historical Inaccuracies in Wolf Hall Don't Matter I posted an excerpt from a longer newspaper article. Wolf Hall is a drama, not a documentary, so artistic licence is allowed. And how accurate can we be about the Tudors anyway…in matters of characterisation, what can accuracy mean? We will never know the exact balance of sexual desire, dynastic ambition and theological disputation that led Henry VIII to marry and divorce in the way that he did. Finally an article saying what I seem to say every damn month. I added brief commentary when I posted the link.

Artisitic License in Vikings, Black Sails, and Da Vinci's Demons A reblog of another article that gets it; Da Vinci’s maxim that “the best story wins” thus applies to historical fiction as a whole. The genre often comes under criticism for historical departures, but as we well know, “history” is a constructed narrative, and what we term “accurate” can often be subjective. Such artistic license not only makes historical fiction more narratively cohesive and dramatically entertaining, but is instructive in ways that history is not, as the artists behind these shows use the conscious inaccuracies to underscore the perspectives and motives of the people of that era, helping us deepen our understand of that era, something history alone cannot do."
I addded my own commentary and graphic.

I'm a 20's Something Erotic Writer Who's Never Had Sex I posted a link to the article with commentary because as an asexual I was hoping to find this inspiring instead of some condescending crap about how with the writer bragging about being "fully functional" despite being a virgin without a husband or kids while being hypocritically nasty about "sad old single romance writers with cats". Her youth will fade and maybe she'll lose her "real" job that she's proud of, and then she'll be the "stereotype" she's so horrified by. Though since this post went utterly unnoticed, maybe everyone agrees with the smug author that it's okay be a virgin but not be an older virgin and/or someone without "real" employment because writing doesn't count. One more author I'll make sure never to read.

Terry Pratchett: An Accidental Pagan Theologian A lovely article I posted a link to that points out "He was one of the very few writers to speculate on how deities come into being, first as particles of energy, then accumulating more energy from the minds of worshippers (in the book Small Gods)" and talks about how "Much of his work explores ideas of social justice."
I added my own commentary: "As a pagan, a lover of stories, and a writer, I agree wholeheartedly. The stories around the power of belief, the power of story, the power of people to affect change, are wonderful concepts. His work has impacted, and continues to impact, my thoughts and beliefs and creativity."

Things I Want in Da Vinci's Demons Season 3 And since I probably won't get the interaction between these two particular characters, despite their shared experiences, I'll just have to write it in fanfic.

Other articles

True Gender Equality Is Actually Perceived As Inequality Reblogged (with some minor commentary in tags) link from a longer article about Fandom and Male Priviledge which is worth a look, examining male privilege generally and the more female nature of fandom and how more recent male involvement risks damaging spaces largely developed by and for women.

In Celebration of Old School Live Journal Timely, given my post about how LJ is not dead is this article where the author waxes nostalgic about LJ and the connections she made through it. Not good enough to keep her invested in using it, and she inadvertently makes a case against Tumblr and it's inability to foster the same kind of personal connections, but it's still an interesting read – and some of the comments on the article are made by current LJ users.

Hapax and Heyer, Austen and Irony, or, What I should have said an interesting article in which the author talks about the difference between the works of Georgette Heyer and those of Jane Austen.

13 Things Fan Fiction Writers Are Very Tired Of Explaining. Yes, we can and usually do write non-fanfic, and actually, writing fic usually isn’t “just a phase” are two of the gems here.

In my mini-meta about sexuality in mainstream vs non-mainstream fiction, I mentioned two articles that I think warrant mention in and of themselves:
The Thing about Reading Fanfic and Original Slash you get used to that particular writing/reading culture after a while. You get used to the frank discussions of sexuality and kink, the close attention to diversity and social justice issues in the text, the unrestrained creativity when it comes to plot. The most amazing, creative, engaging stories I’ve ever read have almost all been fanfiction, and I think part of that is because there’s no limitations placed on the authors.
And
Halt & Catch Pointless Heterosexuality looking particularly at "Supernatural" but addressing issues of representation and queer baiting on the whole: "There are a lot of different rationales fans and viewers put forward in the argument that Dean should not be shown as canonically bisexual, one being that “the show is not about that” or that it would “distract from the story” or that it “serves no purpose.” Alright, well, for the moment let’s just skip over the fact that no one in the history of ever has argued that depictions of heterosexuality ought to be relegated only to shows that are “about” romance/sex. Or that canonical affirmation of a character’s heterosexuality “distracts” from the story. Or that a character’s heterosexuality “serves no purpose” so it should not be present in the narrative at all. Let’s just skip over the queer-phobic nature of demanding that same-sex eroticism constantly justify its own existence in media in a way heterosexuality NEVER EVER EVER is called upon to do. Let’s just by-pass that particular issue, for the moment." The author is rightfully angry about how queer identities are treated.

Day 1 – self promotion
Day 12 - What do you bring to fandom?
Day 13 - Rec a creator
Day 14 - Rec fanworks
Day 15 - Create a challenge - what’s something you want to see more people doing in fandom?

( Day 1 )
( Day 12 )
( Day 13 )
( Day 14 )
( Day 15 )

(click through to source, text reads "I wanna read this very specific fanfiction but I really, really don’t want to write it" - a story about me")


(click through to source, text reads "Problems: 1. I want this story to be written, 2. I don’t want this story to be written by anyone but me, 3. I don’t want to write this story)")

I can relate to both of these. Something more serious now: Championing Your Story

I came across an interesting blog, Insecure Writer's Support Group and in particular the entry entitled 6 Tips To Championing Your Story

It opens with: ( Read more... )

Title: Ichabod vs The Modern World
Fandom: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Type: 12 recs in various media
Prompt: For the trope_bingo prompt 'time travel'"

( Read more... )

I didn't even manage five poems, given the lack of interest, and have resorted to graphics tutorials and, today, recs (in the vain hope what other people have to say is more interesting), so day six will be the last post of poetry week. Still, have a haiku

poetry is one
way of expressing one's
deepest hopes, dreams, fears

Rec's:

Themes of the week were creativity, the highs and lows:

see the whole comic strip here

And the importance of audience:

If we write a book and no one reads it, does the book really exist? Or is it simply a collection of words caught somewhere between yesterday and eternity, destined to float silently through the universe until it disappears altogether?

read the whole article here

It's pretty ironic that for most of these pieces where I'm writing about the importance of audience, I don't have one. There's always people saying "you should totally…" write more poetry/publish a book/finish that fanfic/make a record/learn to edit vids, when what they mean is "You should totally do that but I won't read/listen/watch". It rather reminds me of Zoolander's Hansel enthusing about his "hero", Sting: