SUNDAY LINK LOVE

• Doctor Mew.

Found through io9; art by Jenny Parks

• Doctor Hoot.

Source

• More Doctor Hoot.

Art by Terry Fan

• 40 Best Blog Postings for Writers by Kathy Temean.

• I’m kind of addicted to Sarah Reees Brennan’s Tumblr and Livejournal, so I enjoyed this duel interview with her and Justine Larbalestier, partially because they’re talking about how different their respective writing processes are. Always great to hear the message that every writer is different and that’s okay, as opposed to the message that there’s only one “right” way to write.

• This is a great, sensitive article about how to write lesbians when you’re not a lesbian. Personally, I think that  writers (by and large, not as a rule) need to write identities other than their own in order to increase diversity representation in fiction. But it’s also important to be smart with your portrayals. And sometimes that involves research.

• A little dispiriting, but Kristen Nelson did an interesting thing this week where she posted the rave reviews – and the editor’s rejections – concerning the debut novel Firelight. If you’re looking for more evidence about the inherent subjectivity in writing, then this is the post for you.

• Great article from Kristen Lamb about training to be a career author.

• Ghenet Myrthil posted some excellent tips that she picked up from the Writer’s Digest 2012 conference.

• Shadow art? Did you know this was a thing? I did not. It’s freaking amazing. Michael Offut posted many freaking amazing pictures of freaking amazing shadow art, and I grabbed one of the pics, but there’s tons more on his blog, so head over and check it out.

ROW 80 UPDATE

My ROW 80 goal is to write 750 words a week on 750words.com.

I cheated a little this week. Technically I wrote 750 words every day, making my current word count for the week 5401 – and I still have tomorrow’s writing to do. However, it becomes a lot less impressive when you realize that a lot of that word count was retyping words into the 750 words site, not to mention writing outlines.

On Wednesday, I worked on my short story Rainbow Days and sent part of it to my critique group, but I didn’t generate any new content; I just organized my mixed-up scenes, meaning that there’s now an entire coherent, chronological beginning. Actually, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it came together. Maybe there’s a method to my madness after all. And I’m remembering how much I love to write short stories – someday I would like to publish a short story collection titled These Stories are Not True.

It was good that the short story work was relaxing, because otherwise this week was spent freaking out about KtLO.

You see, I do this thing when I write. This horrible, horrible, horrible thing.

I come up with a million ideas, fall in love with all of them, and refuse to recognize when they just. do. not. fit together. Ladies and gentleman, this is how plot holes form, why characters suddenly start acting out of character. For the most part, I’ve ignored the plot holes and associated problems while drafting, because hey, I’m drafting, and I can go back later and plug in the holes, right? (While we’re on the subject – problems go away when you close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears, right?)

Except that on Friday, I found a mother of a plot hole and it risked collapsing the entire story. I won’t go into details, but basically a potential love interest had some information that completely erased the main character’s major conflict in the story, which happened because the conflict was present in an earlier vision of the story and the love interest was not. And I just sort of came up with both ideas without realizing that they were water and oil to each other. And they were both major THIS IS WHY I’M WRITING THIS STORY ideas.

Anyway, I fixed that.

It should work now, but it involved spending today outlining rather than ‘writing writing’ so I have about 600 words in my word count that are definitely words I typed out, but not words that actually attribute to a page count.

Still, I don’t feel bad. It was necessary.

And that outline looks hella good.

It’s only gonna get worse next week in the fake-word-count department, because I’m going to just focus on the beginning of the story on the while, which means retyping some scenes in order to reorganize them and add some important details. I’m gonna try not to write out of order again until I can get the beginning – my foundation – down. Don’t get me wrong; I think writing out of order is effective, and I highly recommend it. But right now I need to do the writing equivalent of gathering my thoughts.

How was your week, fellow ROWers?

If you’re curious about ROW 80, and/or want to support the participants, check it out here.