What do you do if you receive a story rejection that says the pace is too slow; revise it, adding 200 words; and get another rejection that says it now feels rushed?
Well, if you’re me, you sit down and write a post about pacing, how it’s perceived, and how, as authors, we can control that perception.
The really interesting thing here is that this is not coming from an ideological position by the company of “there should be more of these images available”. It’s based on data mining of popular culture, social media, and what people are already searching for on their site.
Originally shared by Derrick “Quite Clever” Sanders
h/t Tonya Wershow
This is powerful.
Via Lisa Cohen.
Originally shared by Cheryl Martin
Sharing this in part to come back to it later.
Originally shared by MJ Bush
Advanced Techniques
Dialogue is one of those areas that can transform a story into a delight. How does yours measure up?
You can’t own it, but you can kind of squat.
Originally shared by Winchell Chung
Outer Space treaty forbids anybody owning a planet, but there might be a loophole.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/07/eternal-light-up-for-grabs/
Literally epic. As in epic poetry – a form that’s been out of style for a couple of centuries, now used to tell an SF story. Is old the new new?
Originally shared by David Brin
Something is missing. Sure SciFi has taken over popular culture, leaving grownup/literary SF (that explores deep ideas) seeming a bit of a revered grampa. But what’s truly missing is connection to our past. No, not silly-feudal fantasy, that bears no relation to our ancestors’ real challenges and grueling lives. Rather, the oral rhythms and voluptuous wordplay of true, epic poetry!
Now that tradition – beloved of our forebears – has a pulsing, with-it revival in science fiction! Frederick Turner’s wonderful Mars colonization canto led the way. Now he expresses some of our deepest fears… and can-do spirit of hope… in “Apocalypse” wherein he puts into throbbing iambic beat a blending that other SF poets aimed for with the Rhysling Awards and that some of the best hip hop guys* have stabbed-at. Only Fred creates an epic so fluidly readable you’ll call it a compelling novel… that just happens to sing.
Baen Books will start a ten-week electronic serialization of the poem on its very popular subscriber website. Ilium will simultaneously issue the book in inexpensive but handsome hardback and paperback editions.
http://frederickturnerpoet.com/?p=441
* (Hip-hop scifi? Gift of Gab and Blackalicious, especially their excellent pop-rap song “Powers,” which is joyful and stunningly original. Follow Gift of Gab over to The Mighty Underdogs doing “Droppin’ Science Fiction!” Sci-fi rap! Seriously!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isL-M4_Mftk
Via Deborah Teramis Christian. It’s remarkable how many of these women have a story that ends without her final fate being recorded.
Originally shared by Ancient Origins
In most civilizations of the past, it was the men who were engaged in the bloody business of war… but not always. Throughout history there have been many powerful women who have led nations or guided armies into war, renowned not only as fearsome fighters, but also as cunning strategists and inspirational leaders. There were others who made a name for themselves in a domain traditionally held by men and whose story, carried forward over the centuries, continues to be told today.
#ancient #history
For a while now I’ve been setting up trackable links using the Pretty Link WordPress plugin to see whether people will click through from one of my books to the Amazon buy page for another book. I put these links in the back of each book, pointing to the others in the series, and use a naming convention so that I can tell what the source book and target book are.
Today, I was setting one up and had a look at the report (the plugin tracks the number of clicks on each link). The numbers are small – all my sales-related numbers are small – but people are clicking the links. The biggest number is from people clicking through from my first Auckland Allies book to the second, which makes sense, since I recently did a free promo on the first one.
If you’re interested in tracking such things, the plugin is free and easy to use, or you could use another service such as bit.ly.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Or could you?
Originally shared by Winchell Chung
It is possible to purchase Pokemon “lures”.
Businesses find that for about $1.19 an hour they can drastically increase their walk-in traffic by dropping a lure every half-hour.
Language shapes culture as well as the other way around. (And that, apparently, is a sentence that would be phrased quite differently in Chinese.)
Originally shared by Conscious Style Guide
“A deeper kind of worry about our fondness for nouns occurs to me: does it happen, perhaps, that speakers of English are drawn to believe that certain things exist because nouns that serve as their labels exist? Might it be only the labels that exist?”—Perry Link, author of “An Anatomy of Chinese” (Harvard University Press)