Here is some good advice on the craft of manuscript editing. Vonda McIntyre has this (pdf) good introduction to manuscript preparation. Or, in a nut shell, use 12 point courier font, double spaced lines, with Title / Author / Page in the upper right corner, one inch margins on all sides, printed only on one side. Oh yes, paragraphs are indicated by first line being indented and don’t use italics, use a single line underscore instead. Bold has a squiggly line underscore.
More of my links on manuscripts at del.icio.us.
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E. E. Knight has a couple of blog entries of note. The first is on showing not telling, or, in other words, how to avoid exposition dumps. This got me thinking about the opening scenes for the two short stories that I am working on and how I had ended up committing the expositional sin in both. Having set about remedying these transgressions I find that, strangely enough, I am having fun replacing a paragraph of exposition with a page or two of character interaction. Who knew? Well, I did. I had just forgotten.
The second blog entry of interest was about an old Jackie Collins’ paperback and its character based back cover copy and front cover teaser. It struck me that it might be a good exercise to try and do this for (some of) the characters in Tactics. Fifteen minutes later I had a fun little set of six two sentence (more or less) character descriptions. They’re a bit silly so I’m not sure how comfortable I feel in sharing it. Perhaps later (if and when) I take a few more steps down the road to getting published.
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Yesterday evening I had the second reading of “The Alchemist of Liberty” at the writers’ group that I frequent. It went over a bit better than the first part (see my rant from last week), which is not too surprising given its more intense action sequences and introduction of a plethora of new terms (which I have been working on cleaning up). The main critique was to more on the characters and not be so relentless in my introduction of new things, which is, of course, a good suggestion as compelling characterization will usually pull you through the rough spots.
One interesting suggestion to come out of yesterday’s reading was that I should try writing it up as a movie script and sell it to Hollywood as the SFX wizards could do better justice to its visuals. This is not the first time that I have been told, in not so many words, that my writing has a cinematic quality to it. On the other hand, I can’t help but think this is polite way of saying that I should give up on trying to describe complex and/or exotic situations and events. I will politely ignore that, if it is the actual intent of the comment, and continue on trying to describe said exotic complexities.
This does bring to mind one fond wish of mine, which is to have Matt Howarth illustrate a graphic novel based one of my stories. How is that for pie in the sky?
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It looks like there might be a source for a print copy of Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes that can be OCRed. I’ll keep you updated, but the longer term plan is to submit an eCopy to Project Gutenberg.
Original post on Wired Love.
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I ran across an article in physorg.com about orphan stars and this made me think of one of book that I quite enjoyed. So I thought I would go back and find a mini-review (transplanted to the wiki) that I wrote on Against A Dark Background by Iain M. Banks back in 1993. Here it is:
A profoundly dark book. Banks kept me on the edge of my seat both with his intricate culture and well organized plot. Rather than giving all the pertinent details of the history and character backgrounds he leaves them lying like small mental land mines. As I made my way through ”AADB” I found myself stumbling over these cunningly crafted bits of information and each time I experienced an explosion of implication that would light up the background only to fade away leaving a spectral images of potential. An excellent read.
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Posted by: Fritz. in Theme
Blue and black. I like blue, black and gray. And the Mandigo theme is a bit crisper than the Cleaker theme.
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Check out this post by Cherie Priest on the after effects of becoming a published author.
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The excellent and extensive blog by Miss Snark (”Where Miss Snark vented her wrath on the hapless world of writers and crushed them to sand beneath her T.Rexual heels of stiletto snark.”) has recently become more accessible. While it is unfortunate that Miss Snark has gone silent, there is much to be gleaned by what she has left behind. Kelly McCullough at Wyrdsmiths has put together an excellent index into Miss Snark’s posts which I am just beginning to explore.
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