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Hugo and Nebula award winning SF author, host of San Francisco’s SFinSF reading series.
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A first collection of short fiction from an award-winning Canadian writer.
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Authors! 8 Tips For Your Website’s Usability and Design
Some tips to consider when you’re reviewing your current website or when you’re thinking about creating one. Let’s take a look at these tips for your website’s design and usability.
Tags: beginners, business, Monica Valentinelli, web
How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends: Joss Whedon, I’m calling you out.
Dr. Grasshopper explains the medical improbabilities and impossibilities in Dollhouse. The concern isn’t just bad science, it’s also that real people might become afraid of medical procedures due to the misinformation.
Tags: Dr. Grasshopper, How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends
How To Kill Your Imaginary Friends: Flatlines
I’m happy to announce a new feature on the SFWA blog, “How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends: A writer’s guide to diseases and injuries, and how to use them effectively in fiction” written by Dr. Grasshopper.
Tags: Dr. Grasshopper, How to Kill Your Imaginary Friends, medicine, Science-fiction, world building
The Importance of Style Sheets
A style sheet is a document the copyeditor prepares that lists the grammatical conventions, characters, places, unusual or made-up words, and the distinctive treatment of words (capitalization, hyphenation, favored spellings, etc.) within a particular text.
Tags: copyediting, copyeditors, Deanna Hoak, stylesheets
The Networks Around us
This article, reprinted from the Bulletin, explores the various aspects of social networking and how a writer can use them to help promote herself.
Tags: Bulletin, cat rambo, networking, social media
The Moss-Troll Problem
Literature is all about metaphors–analogies. One thing is like another. Much of literature works by saying, “This thing is like this other thing.” In secondary world stories, how do you handle metaphors?
Tags: Sarah Monette, world building, writing advice
Conventions and writing, or Schmoozing 101
A set of six basic ideas with which to approach conventions. Networking is all about being charming and that will vary somewhat depending on the situation. So, here are the basic ideas.
Tags: business, convention, Mary Robinette Kowal
Hunting for a Literary Agent
Article by Chuck Rothman on (almost) everything you need to know about agents, including how to avoid scams.
Tags: agent, Chuck Rothman, Intermediate, Rothman, writing
You Can Take It With You
Interstellar space travel. We dream about it. We write about it. Science fiction writers have come up with all manners of interstellar travel, ranging from multigenerational arks, to wormhole generating warp drives that can spit you across the galaxy in a blink of an eye. As wondrous and amazing as all these approaches may be, most suffer from a very fundamental problem.
Tags: interstellar, physics, robert metzger, science, space travel
Research Tool: A brief intro to furniture history
When writing there will come a moment when you have to deal with furniture. If it’s historical fantasy, steampunk or timetravel you’ll face the question of finding something that is period correct. What did people sit on in 1650? How long have drop-leaf tables been around? What was the most expensive wood?
Tags: research, world building