We Write!
[--- Karen Myers ---] Among a great many pedantic bits of advice for beginning fiction writers is the importance of fully describing a character's environment and perceptions as a way of embedding the reader in that experience. Yeah, well.... Boy, is that easy to do clumsily, using a shopping list approach to note the blue... Continue Reading →
[--- Karen Myers ---] I belong to the school of thought that believes that anything that throws a reader out of a story, that breaks his trance, is a bad thing. Typical offenses in this regard are contradictions within the story world, conflicts with how reality works or actual historical circumstances, and character inconsistency ("...but... Continue Reading →
With the kind permission of our gracious hostess, I'd like to draw your attention to a survey for Indie Authors. Several years ago I joined the Alliance for Independent Authors (abbrev ALLi), an industry group based in the UK with a very substantial US constituency. (You can find out more at the link. They're helpful... Continue Reading →
[--- Karen Myers ---] Chekhov's gun is all very well, but I like my worlds with a little bit more padding on them. Life isn't a stage play, and neither are novels. In brief, the advice is that every object or incident in a story exists to be a clue/foreshadow, either genuine or misleading in... Continue Reading →
[--- Karen Myers ---] Plenty of SFF authors have practiced (professionally) what they preach (in their stories) -- in the world of science, anyway. This is everyone's favorite: Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex by Larry Niven (From "All the Myriad Ways" (1971)). Niven answers all the important questions. It's a classic, and short --... Continue Reading →
[--- Karen Myers ---] The reader is your partner after all... encourage him to invest in your story. Sure, you've got to give your reader all (or most) of the necessary clues... (You can let some of it be a surprise, but he'll complain.) Let's look at some of the ways you can involve your... Continue Reading →
[--- Karen Myers ---] You know all those folks in your story/novel/series? The ones that put on a play under your direction to entertain your readers? Well, guess what... they have their own lives, too. You can't just deflate them and then blow them up again several chapters (or books) later, as if they hadn't... Continue Reading →
[-- Karen Myers --] You learn something every day... With a hat tip to The Passive Voice, I recently discovered something rather astounding (or is it amazing?) -- namely that "the genre of science fiction is deeply indebted to patent law and patent theory" via Hugo Gernsback. This requires some explanation. The first issue of... Continue Reading →
[--- Karen Myers ---] I was born in 1953, and as soon as I could read, I pounced on everything I could find. By the age of eight or nine I was familiar with all the readily available retellings of the northern European folktales (not the sanitized-for-children Disneyesque ones) which included the Brothers Grimm, Perrault,... Continue Reading →
[--- Karen Myers ---] Back in the 1990s, I was doing tech consulting in downtown Chicago. My client was located in the Loop, in one of the older tall buildings that had been retrofitted for data centers in the basement (before that service was typically outsourced **). As techies will do, we traded war stories,... Continue Reading →
Mad Genius Club 