This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on June 3rd, 2014.
“Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him— respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months’ rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.” Craphound, by Cory Doctorow.
The following First Contact scenarios can be used with humans on either side of the encounter. Don’t discount the possibility humans being the relatively more advanced civilization making contact, or both being at about the same level. Most of them can be combined with several others (consider how “missionary work” could be added to “information/signals only”). (more…)
This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on June 19th, 2014.
Say what you want about the unfettered spring of creativity, but I find that there’s a lot to be said for being mechanical and thorough at some parts of the operation.
The best example of this might be the Better Novel Project, which is taking a very deliberative approach to writing a blockbuster novel. What’s one of the things that you could point to as an indicator of runaway success? A film based on the book. Which books have been the most consistent at turning into films— and successful films, at that? YA novels. And of these, you wouldn’t go wrong with holding up Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games as series that enjoyed great commercial success both in print and on the big screen.
This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on June 5th, 2014.
Music
Before we get to talking about anything else, let’s get something out of the way. If you’re anything like me then you like to listen to music while you work. And you often take a liking to a particular song for a particular story. And it kind of messes with your zen thing when you have to switch back to YouTube every three minutes to start your song back (and somebody’ gonna die tonight if there’s that one particular section of the song that you need to listen to for your groove to keep going). (more…)
This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on May 22, 2014.
“Companions, the creator seeks- not corpses, not herds of believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks, those who inscribe new values on new tablets. Fellow creators, the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.” Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Blue and orange morality, says TV Tropes, is what you have when “characters have a moral framework that is so utterly alien and foreign to human experience that we can’t peg them as good or evil… There might be a logic behind their actions, it’s just that they operate with entirely different sets of values and premises with which to draw their conclusions.” (more…)
This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on May 8th, 2014.
Buckle down and get ready for pictures, because today we’re going to talk about, well, insert title here.
Let me start out by adding my voice to the crowd and state that there are really no laws of writing, just training wheels to take off when you feel you’re ready. And then you try not to crash into a car. So don’t think that I’m telling you that this is the one way to Heaven. This column isn’t called Things That Everyone Should Like, and this article isn’t called The One Right Way for You to Get Things Done either.
