Weekend Grab Bag – Writing, Geekiness and Tolkien

Writing:

• As always, Roni Loren’s Fill-Me-In Friday has some good links
• Kristen Lamb’s post, Are Successful Writers Just Lucky? gave me a little boost. It also convinced me to skip NaNoWriMo and concentrate even harder on this WIP.
• At Writer’s in the Storm Blogging Guest – Sue Grimshaw: Acquiring Editor’s Checklist inside peek at what one editor looks for in submissions
• Hope this holds up to the potential promise: Jeff Hermann (author and agent) is starting a social network for Writers, Agents and Editors. Sign up to be in the network when it launches. Sounds like it will have a subscription, because the sign up page said the first 1000 will have a free lifetime membership. As of posting, it was at 884 slots filled.
• Kristy Stewart posted Prose Tip: Simultaneous Syntax, touching on the bane of new writers: starting sentences with -ing phrases that can’t possibly take place at the same time as the rest of the sentence.
• J.A. Bennett has some good alternatives to adverbs in her post The Sin of the Adverb
• Mooderino has some good advice for writers learning craft: try not to become an evangelist of certain rules: Pedantic Much?  
• Literary agent Rachelle Gardener let me exhale a nice “Whew!” earlier in the week with Novelists: Stop Trying to Brand Yourself and social media for writers guru Kristin Lamb touches upon this in The Dark Side of Metrics–Writer Friend or Ticket to Crazy Town?
• Skhye Moncrief has some good tips: Show Don’t Tell: Spotting TELLING in your WIP
• No bales of hay! I thought this was good advice for anyone writing historic fiction, not just for fantasy: Five Things You Should Never Do in Epic Fantasy
• And Becca Puglisi at The Bookshelf Muse, advises to think in layers when revising: Soup and Layers

Ada Lovelace:

• Take Back Halloween has a page on Lady Lovelace and how you can make an Ada Lovelace costume for Halloween

Browncoats:

• This past week if you ran across any Whedonites, you probably saw them grinning with unadulterated joy. Why? Because it was revealed that Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, had made a film in secret! It started with Nathan Fillion tweeting on Sunday: Oh, it’s real. Very. Very. Real. muchadothemovie.com  – since no one knew of it and Mr. Fillion is known to be a prankster, it was thought to be a joke. But no, Joss Whedon assembled many actors from his previous ventures to make a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in 14 days! More details here and here

In Geekdom:

• 50 My Little Pony Mods for Geeks
• Star Wars Yoga Poses for my Yoga enthusiasts out there
• Never before published drawings by Tolkien unearthed: The Hobbit as JRR Tolkien imagined it – in pictures

Posted by Angela Quarles on October 29, 2011

https://angelaquarles.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/weekend-grab-bag-writing-geekiness-and-tolkien/