Sorry it's taken me overlong to announce the winners of the contests. Life has been a little crazy the last three weeks, what with our new addition and all...
But anyway, without further ado, here are the winners (by random draw) of the various giveaways:
The 100 Followers Giveaway: Angela Ackerman - one copy of The Replacement shall be winging its way towards you shortly (unless you changed your mind and wanted a different book)
The Newsletter Subscribers Giveaway: Andrea Clunes - one copy of Divergent
The Fairytale Trap: ALSO Andrea Clunes! See the power of the random generator :)
So, girls, contact me asap (see link at the top of the blog if all else fails) and I'll get your prizes out to you as soon as I can.
Thanks to everyone for entering :)
27 February 2012
20 February 2012
I apologize for not being able to dress myself
Today, to round off the unofficial series of guest posts on creativity, I've invited Krista D. Ball to the blog. Krista is an awesome writer, and we just happen to be TOC buddies in the upcoming Ride the Moon anthology, which is of course tremendously exciting. For me, anyway O:) Go check out her website for some great stories.
Most of the authors I know are incredibly talented. For example, Billie Milholland paints, writes, and does general crafty things. Susan J. Forest writes award-winning short fiction and paints beautiful landscapes.
Me? I need help matching my clothes.
When the kindergarten kids were expressively painting their cats and elephants, I was still working with basic stick figures. I've never actually moved past that stage. I managed to successfully do one splatter painting called "Artist Killed By Sniper" but it generally gets me odd looks; it's currently buried in a box.
Music? Nah, I can't carry a tune. Sew? Please. I don't even know how to use a sewing machine, let alone attach a button. I do crochet, but I can't move past the beginner patterns and even those are often too difficult for me. I used to do cross stitch, and would spend more time pulling apart the pattern than putting it together.
And, yes, I need help matching my clothes.
I have two stores that I shop at and the store people know me now. I go in and say what I need (i.e. I need an outfit to wear at a readercon). They will then go and pick me out an entire outfit: pants, shirt, sweater, scarf, jewelry, socks. The sales staff will tell me if it works or not and I buy the entire set. I then only wear that entire set together until I'm comfortable to switch it up.
I really have no idea what matches, looks good, or is in "good taste."
I've had several bosses over the years that have nitpicked at how I dress. My white socks clash with my grey pants. My brown dress hose clashes with my black shirt. My blue shirt doesn't match my dark jeans. My make up clashes with my eye colour. My hair doesn't match my face. My glasses don't match my eye colour. I can go on. I've come to realize that it really was me, not them. I have no taste.
Oh, I'm sure I am still creative. But outside of books, I'm really not sure that statement applies. So the next time you see a photo of me, remember: someone else dressed me.
According to her mother, Krista D. Ball tells lies for a living. She is the author of several short stories, novellas, and novels. Krista incorporates as much historical information into her fiction as possible, mostly to justify her B.A. in British History.
Krista enjoys all aspects of the writing and publishing world, and has been a magazine intern, co-edited four RPG books, self-published several short stories and a novella series, and has been a slush reader for a small Canadian press. She has also written a non-fiction blogging guide and is currently writing a non-fiction historical book for authors called, "What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank."
Whenever she gets annoyed, she blows something up in her fiction. Regular readers of her work have commented that she is annoyed a lot.
Most of the authors I know are incredibly talented. For example, Billie Milholland paints, writes, and does general crafty things. Susan J. Forest writes award-winning short fiction and paints beautiful landscapes.
Me? I need help matching my clothes.
When the kindergarten kids were expressively painting their cats and elephants, I was still working with basic stick figures. I've never actually moved past that stage. I managed to successfully do one splatter painting called "Artist Killed By Sniper" but it generally gets me odd looks; it's currently buried in a box.
Music? Nah, I can't carry a tune. Sew? Please. I don't even know how to use a sewing machine, let alone attach a button. I do crochet, but I can't move past the beginner patterns and even those are often too difficult for me. I used to do cross stitch, and would spend more time pulling apart the pattern than putting it together.
And, yes, I need help matching my clothes.
I have two stores that I shop at and the store people know me now. I go in and say what I need (i.e. I need an outfit to wear at a readercon). They will then go and pick me out an entire outfit: pants, shirt, sweater, scarf, jewelry, socks. The sales staff will tell me if it works or not and I buy the entire set. I then only wear that entire set together until I'm comfortable to switch it up.
I really have no idea what matches, looks good, or is in "good taste."
I've had several bosses over the years that have nitpicked at how I dress. My white socks clash with my grey pants. My brown dress hose clashes with my black shirt. My blue shirt doesn't match my dark jeans. My make up clashes with my eye colour. My hair doesn't match my face. My glasses don't match my eye colour. I can go on. I've come to realize that it really was me, not them. I have no taste.
Oh, I'm sure I am still creative. But outside of books, I'm really not sure that statement applies. So the next time you see a photo of me, remember: someone else dressed me.
According to her mother, Krista D. Ball tells lies for a living. She is the author of several short stories, novellas, and novels. Krista incorporates as much historical information into her fiction as possible, mostly to justify her B.A. in British History.
Krista enjoys all aspects of the writing and publishing world, and has been a magazine intern, co-edited four RPG books, self-published several short stories and a novella series, and has been a slush reader for a small Canadian press. She has also written a non-fiction blogging guide and is currently writing a non-fiction historical book for authors called, "What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank."
Whenever she gets annoyed, she blows something up in her fiction. Regular readers of her work have commented that she is annoyed a lot.
14 February 2012
When Less is More
Less is more. I’ve heard some people twist this maxim to ‘more is more’. Granted, that works in some situations, and the whole ‘less is more’ idea obviously has its limits: some food is better than no food! And some words on a page definitely give the reader the idea of the story better than no words. You can definitely have too little.
But you can also have too much. I’m referring, here, to the idea of overwriting – something which I was guilty of as an inexperienced writer for far too many years, partially because no one could tell me what they actually meant when they said I had overwritten something (not even my university creative writing lecturer!). It took a few years of practice, lots of critiquing, and the revisiting of some of my old university notes to figure out what they really meant.
Here’s the thing: when I sit down to write, I often have a pretty specific idea in my head of what everything looks like – where things are in relation to each other, colours, general interaction of characters and setting, and so forth. Obviously, the entire point of writing is to try to convey that mental image to the people who will read my story, and that’s what learning to write is about – learning how best to perform telepathy and transfer the image from my head to yours. Writing really is magical :)
Like all good magic, though, there’s a catch: your head isn’t a blank slate waiting for me to throw stuff at. Readers come to everything they read with their own perceptions, backgrounds, and associations – both for concepts and individual words. I do this activity in my creative writing class at school where I read out the description of a room and ask all the students to draw it. Of course, every drawing I get is different; some drew it from different perspectives, some interpreted my words in different ways – and of course, they all fill in the gaps differently.
Because here’s the other thing: no matter how detailed I am in my description, I will always leave gaps. Something about the quality of the light, or the exact proportions of the objects, or the precise shade or tone, or the temperature, or smell, or the feel of the carpet on my feet – something will always slip through my description, and the students will always have to fill in some gaps.
The students, of course, are like readers. Reader Response Theory posits that readers derive their own meaning from texts using multiple layers as clues – the phonetic layer, where we figure out the meaning of each sound, the orthographic layer, where we figure out what sounds the squiggles on the page represent, the semantic layer where we figure out what words as a whole mean, and so on and so forth. There is always going to be some fundamental similarity of meaning that all readers will have in common – Hamlet is after all not a muffin, as my university lecturer would say – but there will also be differences (sometimes slight, sometimes significant) in the way that readers perceive a story that will mean that they have different interpretations of it.
This is a good thing! I don’t know about you, but I find the most boring stories are the ones where everything is served up to me, where I don’t have to exercise my imagination or engage on any meaningful level in order to get through it. Gaps are good – gaps engage the reader and give them some work to do. Of course, as I said at the beginning, some food is better than none, and you don’t want to lapse into obscurity so that the reader has no clue what you’re talking about – that will generally make me throw down a book just as quickly as if the writer had swamped me with every single detail. It’s all about the balance: not overwriting (too few gaps) and not underwriting (too many gaps).
For me, writing is most of all about being conscious of the words you use. Maybe not in draft-mode, but at least at the final-edit stage, I have to go through and check my word usage, and make sure that every word is the best one for that moment, that it all means what I intend it to. But being a conscious writer means more than that – it also means being conscious of the gaps you leave in your work. There will always be gaps – and there should be – but they should be gaps that you have chosen.
How do you choose where to leave the gaps? Significance. Does it really matter that your protagonist is wearing a red shirt? Sometimes, yes. If, for example, he’s about to be sacrificially shot so the rest of the team can get away, sure, the fact that he has a red shirt might be symbolic. Ditto if you’re wanting to subtly foreshadow his part in an upcoming murder, or that he will die soon, or whatever. Or even if it’s just because he’s going to spill some tomato sauce on himself and it will be pretty critical to the plot that it doesn’t show up. If it’s just red because, then maybe not so much.
The key point is critical to the plot. Significant detail. Does it really matter if the reader misses this particular detail? If not, leave it out. The words that remain will be that much stronger, that much tighter, and the core of your meaning that much clearer if you do.
But you can also have too much. I’m referring, here, to the idea of overwriting – something which I was guilty of as an inexperienced writer for far too many years, partially because no one could tell me what they actually meant when they said I had overwritten something (not even my university creative writing lecturer!). It took a few years of practice, lots of critiquing, and the revisiting of some of my old university notes to figure out what they really meant.
Here’s the thing: when I sit down to write, I often have a pretty specific idea in my head of what everything looks like – where things are in relation to each other, colours, general interaction of characters and setting, and so forth. Obviously, the entire point of writing is to try to convey that mental image to the people who will read my story, and that’s what learning to write is about – learning how best to perform telepathy and transfer the image from my head to yours. Writing really is magical :)
Like all good magic, though, there’s a catch: your head isn’t a blank slate waiting for me to throw stuff at. Readers come to everything they read with their own perceptions, backgrounds, and associations – both for concepts and individual words. I do this activity in my creative writing class at school where I read out the description of a room and ask all the students to draw it. Of course, every drawing I get is different; some drew it from different perspectives, some interpreted my words in different ways – and of course, they all fill in the gaps differently.
Because here’s the other thing: no matter how detailed I am in my description, I will always leave gaps. Something about the quality of the light, or the exact proportions of the objects, or the precise shade or tone, or the temperature, or smell, or the feel of the carpet on my feet – something will always slip through my description, and the students will always have to fill in some gaps.
The students, of course, are like readers. Reader Response Theory posits that readers derive their own meaning from texts using multiple layers as clues – the phonetic layer, where we figure out the meaning of each sound, the orthographic layer, where we figure out what sounds the squiggles on the page represent, the semantic layer where we figure out what words as a whole mean, and so on and so forth. There is always going to be some fundamental similarity of meaning that all readers will have in common – Hamlet is after all not a muffin, as my university lecturer would say – but there will also be differences (sometimes slight, sometimes significant) in the way that readers perceive a story that will mean that they have different interpretations of it.
This is a good thing! I don’t know about you, but I find the most boring stories are the ones where everything is served up to me, where I don’t have to exercise my imagination or engage on any meaningful level in order to get through it. Gaps are good – gaps engage the reader and give them some work to do. Of course, as I said at the beginning, some food is better than none, and you don’t want to lapse into obscurity so that the reader has no clue what you’re talking about – that will generally make me throw down a book just as quickly as if the writer had swamped me with every single detail. It’s all about the balance: not overwriting (too few gaps) and not underwriting (too many gaps).
For me, writing is most of all about being conscious of the words you use. Maybe not in draft-mode, but at least at the final-edit stage, I have to go through and check my word usage, and make sure that every word is the best one for that moment, that it all means what I intend it to. But being a conscious writer means more than that – it also means being conscious of the gaps you leave in your work. There will always be gaps – and there should be – but they should be gaps that you have chosen.
How do you choose where to leave the gaps? Significance. Does it really matter that your protagonist is wearing a red shirt? Sometimes, yes. If, for example, he’s about to be sacrificially shot so the rest of the team can get away, sure, the fact that he has a red shirt might be symbolic. Ditto if you’re wanting to subtly foreshadow his part in an upcoming murder, or that he will die soon, or whatever. Or even if it’s just because he’s going to spill some tomato sauce on himself and it will be pretty critical to the plot that it doesn’t show up. If it’s just red because, then maybe not so much.
The key point is critical to the plot. Significant detail. Does it really matter if the reader misses this particular detail? If not, leave it out. The words that remain will be that much stronger, that much tighter, and the core of your meaning that much clearer if you do.
13 February 2012
Blog Tour + Giveaways!
Hi there! Just a quick reminder that while I've been off busy spawning a minion:
...the giveaways are still active, regardless of what they might say in-post. See here and here, and please! Encourage people to enter! Share and spread the word!
Also, belatedly, I am part of a blog tour! Random Writing Rants is a week-ish long blog hop that we are actually nearly at the end of (sigh), but it's never too late to join the fun! My post, called "When Less is More", will be up HERE TOMORROW.
Check out the rest of the contributors, starting here with Chrystalla Thoma's rant about hopping :)
...the giveaways are still active, regardless of what they might say in-post. See here and here, and please! Encourage people to enter! Share and spread the word!
Also, belatedly, I am part of a blog tour! Random Writing Rants is a week-ish long blog hop that we are actually nearly at the end of (sigh), but it's never too late to join the fun! My post, called "When Less is More", will be up HERE TOMORROW.
Check out the rest of the contributors, starting here with Chrystalla Thoma's rant about hopping :)
9 Febr: A. Merc Rustad – On Voice
10 Febr: Marie Dees – Building a Novel from Nothing
11 Febr: Krista D. Ball – Avoiding the Heroine Stupid Juice
12 Febr: Marion Sipe – Rant on Stereotypes, Cliches and Tropes
13 Febr: Ada Hoffmann – On Blundering
14 Febr: Amy Laurens – When Less is More
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
