Some things come in waves, and this month was a tsunami. So much has been going on that overwhelmed my reading life this month, not the least of which was the rise of the delta variant and preparing to send the kids back to school in it. I also had a few duds on my reading list this month that I didn’t end up finishing. With that caveat, this is what I got through.
Continue reading “What I Read: July 2021”Tag: writing
Springtime and Change
So, a lot has changed since my last post in September. To sum up:
- My husband and I moved our family from Washington to Utah! My husband’s job as a programmer went permanently remote, so as of January 2021, we can live anywhere in the US. I have always wanted to move back to my home state of Utah, and this seemed doubly important after the pandemic cut us off from visiting family. So we sold our home in Bellevue and are now under contract to buy a home in Highland, UT. It’s been a wild ride, but we’re in the home stretch and should be settled in our new place this summer.
- Homeschooling is wonderful and horrible and ending soon. Being able to school the kids anywhere was a real blessing during our move but has also been an absolute drain on my creative energy. I’ve loved teaching about science and literature, but all the planning has really kept me from doing much else. The good news is: only 10 or weeks to go. I’m excited to have a break for the summer and send the kids back to public school in the fall.
- I’ve decided to be more open about my interest in Mormon literature on this blog. At first, I was hesitant to include my religion in this blog at all. As someone once told McKay Coppins, “Mormons have no cultural cachet.” The religious right hates us because we’re not mainline Christians, the left sees us as bigoted conservatives. Obviously exceptions exist, but to admit you’re Mormon and to talk about Mormon books is to severely limit your audience in both directions. Even other Mormons often aren’t interested in Mormon lit. It would be so much easier to just focus on mainstream works. But the intersection of religion, and particularly Mormonism, and speculative fiction is kind of a big thing for me. I’ve had an abstract accepted for the SFRA Review special issue on Mormons and SF, and I haven’t been this excited to write something in a long time. I’m going to have to embrace this niche and hope someone appreciates it as much as I do.
I hope to come back to writing more frequently on this blog as my homeschool workload wraps up and the move finishes, so watch this space for more lit crit and writing process in action!
Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury
Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master
Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.
This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.
A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.
But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.
Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:
Continue reading “Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury”5 Thoughts from Winning NaNoWriMo for the First Time, and What’s Next
I did it! I started this month with zero words in my novel Alchemist of Heroes, and on Saturday, I finished with 50,076 words in my novel. A few notes from my NaNoWriMo experience:
1. Don’t quit, even if the book you are writing is terrible. I spent the second weekend of NaNoWriMo worrying about what to do about my novel. My plot was stuck, I had no idea where to go from here or how to make it believeable. I didn’t like my main character because she was too passive. I thought about just starting my book over again with a different angle. But I didn’t. On Monday, I just did a five year time jump and kept going. And I started to like my book again. But I got plot-blocked at least two more times during the month, where I had no idea how to write what my outline said I was supposed to write next. One of the most valuable things I learned from NaNo was to keep writing and not worry about how it would turn out and if the writing would be worth it. I ignored self-doubt and kept going, and it turned out better than I thought. By writing through to the end, I found that it is normal and expected to feel like whatever you are currently working on is terrible. Finish it first, then decide if it’s terrible.
Continue reading “5 Thoughts from Winning NaNoWriMo for the First Time, and What’s Next”NaNoWriMo Week 2 Debrief
Been feeling pretty good this week. Got tired by Friday but a break all day Saturday has me fired up to go again. About 1000 words behind my personal timeline, but ahead of the NaNoWriMo website goal, so I’ll call it even. Notes from this week:
- The details of my magic system are finally coming to me as I’m writing situations in which my characters have to use it. I guess discovery writing does work. I’m really happy with the way it’s coming together, as one of my biggest fears about fiction writing is not having any ideas.
- Though I love my favorite writing podcasts, I found that listening to good fiction right before writing made it easier to start. I’ve been listening to Howl’s Moving Castle this week and I’ve been much more productive. (Also, incidentally, Dianna Wynne Jones is clearly a discovery writer with a meandering plot and she doesn’t explain tons about the magic and yet it works so well. Very heartening.)
- For writing scenes with lots of dialogue, I have found it easier to spew out a lot of lines of discussion and ideas I want to include and then go back and add in the stage directions and who says what. As I do, the dialogue also gets refined.
- Everyone has crappy first drafts. Even Brandon Sanderson. Keep going so you’ll at least have something to fix.