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Workshop on Characters

Yesterday I went to a one-day Hugo House workshop with Karen Joy Fowler. The focus of the workshop was how to create characters and convey those characters in your writing. Karen was wonderful — very friendly and also a good teacher. A few tidbits:

When you have to come up with a character, use a character from a children’s book as a starting point. Characters in children’s books are distilled down and simplified.

Another good source of inspiration for characters is bits of conversation you hear. Often you get only a small piece of the conversation, but it can be …

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Sub #39 – A pre-Clarion story to Lone Star Stories. This is the story I used for my application to Clarion. This is my third sub to Lone Star Stories.

Rejection #31 – About eight hours to a rejection from Lone Star (yes, they are fast!).

Sub #40 – to Futurismic (my first submission to that market).

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This weekend should be a good one for writerly activities. The construction crew that makes banging noises from 7:30 to 5:30 every day does NOT work on weekends, so Saturday I’m hoping to finish up the short-ish fantasy-ish story that …

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Round and round they go…

Submission #38 – Sent one of my Clarion stories off to Interzone for their e-submission period (May). This is my first time subbing to Interzone.

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Rejection #30 – From Strange Horizons, with comments. I’ve gotten personalized rejections from SH the last few times through, which is encouraging.

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Question: How long does it take to strip the siding off an apartment building?
Answer: Longer than 2 weeks (and they still aren’t done).

The incessant pounding noise the construction guys make is not terribly conducive to me being productive. I’m one of those writers the …

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Submission #37

Sub #37 to Realms of Fantasy (my 2nd submission there)

This is my 19th submission for 2007, which means I’ve sent out more subs so far this year than I sent out all of last year, and it’s only May :)

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I’m a thousand words into a new WIP — a fantasy story this time, since my brain wanted a break after doing the 6k SFnal one. I think the story’s nearly done, actually, so when it’s finished I might try to trim it down into a flash-length story.

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Submission #36

Sub#36 – to F&SF

This gets me up to six stories out in circulation (still one short of my all-time high of seven, but up from a while ago when I was down to four).

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Productivity seems to come in bursts for me. After finishing up a longish SF story yesterday, I wrote a slightly-longer-than-flash (1.5k) dark fantasy story today, more or less in one sitting.

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This That and the Next Thing

Last weekend I went to Peter Beagle’s one-day writing workshop at Hugo House. We did some writing exercises geared toward creating a distinctive voice: writing a monologue in a non-human voice, writing a dialog between two characters where it was clear who was speaking even without any tags. The exercises (at least for me) were as much about thinking from a different POV as they were about dialog per se. I wanted to generate dialog that was unique to the character on more than just the surface level of vocabulary and speech patterns.

tinaconnolly came to the Peter …

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Notes, notes, and more notes

Outlines, character development, and other miscellaneous notes for the novel are finally coming together. Things are looking good to start writing at the beginning of May. I’ve also made another attempt at breaking off a chunk of the story to do as a short story (or it may end up being more of a novelette). Anyway, the bit I’m thinking about breaking off comes right near the start of the novel, so even if it doesn’t work on it’s own, I can convert it into chapters or something after the fact. Hopefully I’ll be able to write the story/novelette version …

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