Sometimes I don’t know what possessed me to get a Master’s degree in creative non-fiction. It’s not the degree that perplexes me as much as the subject. I love to blog, and I enjoy memoir and personal essay, but my life is so incredibly boring that to share the details of it with you would be tantamount to torture, and, as we all know, we don’t use torture here in the United States.
I don’t normally do tutorials of my crafts because I always forget to take pictures of the steps along the way. At some point I’d like to do a time-lapse video when I paint something for my Etsy store, but I don’t currently have the setup. When I got the idea for this little Discworld figurine, however, I reminded myself to document the process for anyone curious as to how I made a miniature model of the Great A’tuin, world turtle, from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.
I have been on such a writing streak for the last week that I’m honestly afraid of what happens when it ends. I haven’t been this productive since college – when I was sitting through lectures on literature and secretly writing scenes for my YA book instead of taking notes. Class was great for my productivity, largely because for some reason unknown to me, I get my best inspiration when I’m supposed to be doing something else, like listening. (I wrote a ton of fan fiction during high school. Literally, during it.)
As a still-unemployed person, I have signed up to receive multiple daily emails that aggregate job openings based on my chosen keywords. Most days, they’re pretty useless, though occasionally potential employment shines through – a job description that at least merits an application. But as I scanned my emails from ZipRecruiter and Simply Hired this [...]
My first blog for indie publisher Quirk Books was posted yesterday: It’s National Library Week, and even fictional characters need a place to check out books from time to time. Though it’s not always the case, fictional libraries tend to be magical; after all, they’re created by writers, and writers know the power of the written word. If [...]
My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing yesterday after Felicia Day (Buffy, The Guild, Dollhouse, Eureka) retweeted my exclamatory blurb for her newest project: the Geek and Sundry YouTube channel. Specifically, I urged people to “watch @feliciaday make a fireplace poker with a real live blacksmith!” which spawned several good-natured jokes about undead blacksmiths or pokers made from blacksmith bits, and a surprising stream of retweets.
But 140 characters is barely a sentence, so I thought I’d go ahead and share a slightly more detailed reaction to all the nerdy programming that debuted.
Like a lot of kids, I used to wish the fantasy worlds I read about really existed. It was a not-so-secret hope that I’d have a magic adventure like the siblings in the Chronicles of Narnia or Edward Eager books, even though I knew from a very young age it was never actually going to happen (I don’t have brothers or sisters.) But there was always that little voice in my head that reminded me no one ever expected to be carried off to another world, and, in fact, that was sort of the point.
So I could easily relate to Quentin Coldwater, the main character in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. At least at first.
Spend enough time watching the Master, and you start to expect the sudden, soul-crushing deaths of your favorite characters – particularly when nearing the end of a series. Sometimes I have to remind myself that not every writer has Joss Whedon’s love of sticking a knife in my gut vis-a-vis killing off a beloved fictional hero. Unfortunately, it seems that for a genre story to achieve any sort of legitimacy from the wider world, death is the key. Not just any death, mind you. To really achieve mainstream acclaim, that death must be a) shocking, b) of an innocent, and c) as a result (direct or indirect) of another hero’s actions.
Right, blogging. That thing I do to maintain my online cred and market myself as a writer. When I blog, I prefer to write anecdotes, or short essays – the sort of thing you might find in a magazine – or at least something more interesting than a catalogue of what I’ve had to eat.
I started this blog in 2008 as I was preparing to graduate from college with a degree in creative writing. I had an unpaid internship as the assistant to a producer; I was submitting my YA novel to agents, short stories to literary journals, and gathering plenty of material on what not to do. (I have an enormous MS Word document of other people’s query letters that are each horrendous in their own way.) A lot has changed since then (and, sadly, a lot has not), but what I always hoped to do with this blog was share my successes and failures in the writer’s market, and possibly help others learn from my mistakes.
So this is what I’m doing: I’m writing a comic book.
I posted a tutorial on my blog for creating a miniature of the Great A’Tuin from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld - The Turtle Moves.
