Category: Writing

Workshops

Back when the U.S. was an agrarian society, schools closed in the summer so students (and teachers) could help with the harvests.

Ironically, this long outdated calendar is what now gives many of us time off in the summer to attend (or teach) workshops.

My friend Mike Schway just posted a video of Cajun grand master Milton Vanicor performing (and teaching) at Fiddle Tunes at Fort Warden. Many of us have been posting pictures of Neil Gaiman reading (and teaching) at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle. Mike, who players fiddle and accordion, wouldn’t dream of missing Fiddle Tunes. Just as I wouldn’t dream of missing the Clarion West Write-a-thon.

Write. Now.

It’s time to join Clarion West’s “shadow workshop” and spend the summer writing.

Are you a wordsmith who wants to spend more time writing fiction?

I’m always delighted when my friends in journalism, marketing communications, and technical writing reveal that they have fiction projects underway — novels, short stories, poetry, and flash fiction. I want to tell you about a great way to get some of that creative work done this summer, as part of a virtual community of 300 writers.

Clarion West is a Seattle nonprofit that for 30 years has hosted a six-week residential summer workshop for writers of speculative fiction. It also has less-intensive opportunities for those of us who want to experiment with fiction writing or get back to a neglected fiction project. One of those opportunities is the summer Write-a-thon.

The Write-a-thon is like a Walk-a-thon, but usually less physical (unless your computer is on one of those new treadmill desks).

speculative fiction write-a-thon
You really should write that story.

Here’s how the Write-a-thon works: You set goals for your fiction writing and, if you want, a goal for raising money for Clarion West’s operations. Then you create a Clarion West account and a Write-a-thon page. After that, all you have to do is start writing.

If you’re the marketing type, tell your friends what you’re doing and ask them to support you and Clarion West. If you’re shy — hey, that’s OK. Clarion West will list you on their website, with a link to a Write-a-thon page where people can read your bio and an excerpt of your (published or unpublished) writing. You’ll attract donors (and perhaps secret admirers) this way.

Perks of Write-a-thon participation include hanging out with the Clarion West community on Facebook and attending “Tweet-ups” with some very cool authors.

I hope you’ll join me in getting some writing done this summer and raising some money for Clarion West.

My Clarion West Write-a-thon page is up. I’ve set the goal of writing three new short stories and submitting one to a magazine or anthology. I’ve also set a goal of raising $1,000 towards Clarion West’s operating expenses.

I hope you’ll join us, as a writer (Sign up before June 22!) or as a donor (You’ll have until August 2 to make a contribution). Please visit the Clarion West Write-a-thon headquarters to check out the growing list of Write-a-thon participants and read excerpts of fiction from hot new authors like Corry Skerry, Cat Rambo, and Jude-Marie Green and established novelists like Steve Miller and Cassie Alexander.

Please feel free to ask me questions about Clarion West, and I’ll be happy to answer them.

Full disclosure: I’m a member of the Clarion West board of directors and I’m committed to making a transformational workshop experience available for talented and courageous writers. 

1 terabyte of guilty storage

Be aware: What you save in cash on a yard sale bargain may cost you in karma. This is the story of my new 1-terabyte hard drive.

I don’t feel at all guilty about the new iMac I bought for my office. I am, however, experiencing some real stress about the brand-new 1-terabyte Western Digital hard drive I’m using to handle Time Machine backups for the iMac.

That’s because I only paid $5 for it.

At a yard sale.

Here’s the story:

garage sale writer wayOn a bright sunny Saturday last summer, we were headed off on errands when we detoured to follow a yard sale sign. We found ourselves on a neat little block where the corner house had tables and clothing racks set out. It was a real “chick” yard sale — like a chick flick, but all the squealing is over inexpensive Nordstrom clothing rather than cute guys. Two perky blonde moms with their adorable blond children had set out a sale of gently used clothing, toys, and decor items. Tom, probably with a mind to accruing points so that he could thoroughly  investigate a subsequent yard sale full of DVDs, wandered around while I perused the racks of elegant clothing, looking for something that was not too floral or pastel. As I recall, I found a nice navy blue scarf. I didn’t pay much attention when Tom waved a bright green shrink-wrapped box at me and said “Only five dollars.”

“Sure,” I said, vaguely registering something called “My Book.” I figured it was a kid’s toy of some kind, or perhaps a little gadget for digital photos.

It was only the following day that I saw the “My Book” on our mail table, took a close look, and realized it was a brand-new 1-terabyte hard drive. I looked online and discovered that it sells at places like OfficeMonster for between $125 and $175.

“That much?” Tom marveled. He’d assumed it was something old and out of date.

Obviously, there’d been a terrible mistake at the yard sale. But we couldn’t remember where the yard sale had been. On the way to the store the next day, we drove through the neighborhood where the sale had been, but the sale signs were down and all the neat little blocks looked the same.

So, there we were. With somebody’s expensive hard drive, and a bit of guilt.

But, wait — the story gets worse. Or better, depending on your sense of humor.

A week or two after the yard sale, I was at the local OfficeMonster buying what I always seem to be buying there — HP ink cartridges. I got into the checkout line and sighed. Our local OfficeMonster has a cashier ( let’s call her Brunhilde) who is slow as an ancient laser printer. She asks you if you need any of their weekly specials and goes through each item while you vehemently say “No” to each one. She asks if you have your special coupons — and clucks at you if you don’t. She asks if you have your OfficeMonster Preferred Dinosaur card. And she enunciates every syllable of it all.

The handsome man in front of me in the line looked about ready to strangle Brunhilde. He was clearly in  a hurry. He had only one item on the counter, was waving cash, and his two adorable little blond children were tugging at his leg.

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

“Daddy’s hurrying,” he told them through clenched teeth, as Brunhilde droned her way through a list of weekly specials.

She finally rang up the purchase, and that’s when I noticed the item the fellow was buying. It was a  bright green shrink-wrapped box. It looked familiar. So, come to think of it, did the two adorable little blond children. I’d seen them, and a 1-terabyte Western Digital hard drive, before. At that yard sale.

I opened my mouth. And closed it. And opened my mouth again. And closed it.

This was tricky. I realized that if I told this man I’d purchased his hard drive at a yard sale a few weeks earlier, I stood a chance of creating a larger problem than I was solving. If he’d been assured by his wife that his hard drive was “probably lost,” and I stepped forward with information that confirmed his darkest suspicions that it had been “lost” in her yard sale — well, things could get ugly. And then there was Brunhilde. Triggering something that would result in her having to void a purchase would hardly make us popular with the long line of OfficeMonster customers already fidgeting behind me.

While I stood there weighing my options, the two adorable blond children were dragging their grouchy dad and his new hard drive out of the store and into the parking lot. Brunhilde had grabbed my ink cartridges and launched into her recitation of the weekly specials. I nodded along, in a daze. To her delight and amazement, I accidentally bought 10 reams of OfficeMonster paper.

At least someone was having a good day.

That night, I told Tom what had happened — and not happened — at the office supplies store.

“Oh my,” was all he said.

I’m now enjoying the 1-terabyte Western Digital hard drive, but remain aware that what I saved in cash I probably spent in karma. So we’ve resolved that the next time we have a yard sale we’ll include one or two really spectacular bargains.

Intentionally.

Social Media Survival presentation

A social media program that makes perfect sense today is likely to be significantly out of alignment in 18 months.

Last night I spoke about social media at Lee Schoentrup’s class on public relations writing at the University of Washington. This is the sixth year I’ve done the presentation. I think when I started, with blogger Peggy Sturdivant, all we talked about was…blogging.

Six years later, the list of social media tools I cover goes on, and on, and on. While in the past I’ve focused on social media strategies for particular tools, this year I revamped the presentation to focus on the need for a social media strategy that can roll with continuous change. I pointed to trends affecting social media, including:

  • Crowds (crowdsourcing, etc.)
  • Increasing use of mobile devices to create and access social media content
  • The return of organic content after the recent obsession with SEO

It’s clear to me that a social media program that makes perfect sense today is likely to be significantly out of alignment in 18 months. Who knew two years ago that companies would be getting mileage out of Facebook and Pinterest? How many companies are providing a good experience for the growing number of people who visit their blogs (or Facebook and LinkedIn pages) using a smartphone? How many are even aware of the social media consequences (good and bad) of sprinkling “Like” and “Share” buttons around their web pages?

I changed the topic of the presentation from “Social Media Success” to “Social Media Survival.” It’s a jungle out there.

Members of the UW class who would like to download a PDF of the Keynote presentation will find it here: SME – UW – 2013.

The return of Amazing Stories

Steve Davidson and a team of 50 bloggers have relaunched Amazing Stories magazine as a community site for science fiction fans.

Screen Shot 2014-09-10 at 1.56.48 PMApril 1926 — Hugo Gernsback, publisher of Electrical Experimenter science magazine, launched the first magazine devoted to science fiction — or what Gernsback liked to call “scientifiction.” Amazing Stories was published for almost 80 years, passing through the hands of a wide range of publishers (including, in the late 1990s, Wizards of the Coast). It debuted writers including Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin, but the magazine suffered from uneven leadership, uneven quality, and controversial editorial policies. It ceased publication in 2005.

January 21, 2013 — Steve Davidson of Experimenter Publishing (note the company name) has re-launched Amazing Stories as a web community, with the goal of establishing a market that will enable him to revive the professional fiction magazine. Davidson, curator of the Classic Science Fiction Channel website and author of several books on paintball, spent three years obtaining the rights to the Amazing Stories name. He published two online issues of the magazine last year, as a proof of concept.

“Every genre fan now has a chance to help support the creation of a new market for the stories, artwork, and articles they all love so much,” Davidson said in a news release this morning.

At the core of the new site’s content are posts by a team of bloggers covering a wide range of science fiction-related topics. The site will offer product reviews, convention news and listings, and will take advertising.

I have more than just a science fiction reader’s interest in the revival of Amazing Stories. I’m going to be one of the bloggers for the site, writing primarily (but not exclusively) about my explorations of science fiction-related communities including gaming, girl geekdom, the Maker community, Steampunk, Browncoats, Discworld, and SF/mystery crossovers. Please come join us at Amazing Stories.

Space. Magic. What more could you ask?

An ebook of David Levine’s short story collection, Space Magic, including his Hugo Award-winning story “Tk’Tk’Tk,” is out from Book View Café today.

An ebook of David Levine’s short story collection, Space Magic, including his Hugo Award-winning story “Tk’Tk’Tk,” is out from Book View Café today. You’ll find it at amazon.com, in Apple’s iBookstore, at nook.com, and at the Book View Café online store.

This includes some of the finest speculative fiction I’ve read. David’s explorations of astonishingly imaginative “what if?” scenarios are precise, rigorous, and often deeply moving. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Levine Space Magic“This Endeavour Award-winning collection pulls together 15 critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy stories that take readers from a technicolor cartoon realm to an ancient China that never was, and from an America gone wrong to the very ends of the universe. Including the Hugo Award-winning “Tk’Tk’Tk,” the Writers of the Future Award winner “Rewind,” “Nucleon,” “The Tale of the Golden Eagle,” and many other highly praised stories, Space Magic shows David D. Levine’s talents not only as a gifted writer but as a powerful storyteller whose work explores the farthest reaches of space as well as the depths of the human heart.”

The collection is $5.99, and the stories in it are available as individual ebooks for 99 cents each. Highly recommended.

Book View Café (“Because you can never have too many ebooks”) publishes works by Vonda N. McIntyre, Laura Anne Gilman, Jeffrey A. Carver, Phyllis Irene Radford, Linda Nagata, Chaz Brenchley, and many other speculative fiction, mystery, and romance authors. While you’re there, check out Chris Dolley’s Reeves & Worcester Steampunk mysteries, including What Ho, Automation!

To engage website readers, replace “we” with “you”

To engage website visitors, shift the focus from what your organization is doing for them to what they can do with your products and services.

photo showing people pointing to youWhen I edit a client’s website, the first thing I look at is tone. If the content makes the reader feel passive, powerless, or bored, I spice it up. Sometimes spicing it up involves adding more substantive, useful information. But, oddly, often all it requires is changing a few words. This has become so instinctive for me that I don’t often analyze how I’m doing it.

Recently a woman whose website I was editing asked how she could write copy that wouldn’t need to be edited and recast. This forced me to look at exactly what I was doing to enliven her copy. Here’s what I discovered:

I change sentences that leave the reader in a passive position (relative to the website) to sentences that focus the spotlight on the reader and his or her experience.

Example: “We have arranged for rapid check-in.” becomes “You’ll enjoy rapid check-in when you arrive.”

While this is natural for me, as an outside consultant, it’s difficult for in-house writers. That’s because they are so aware of how hard the organization has worked on a project they can’t resist the temptation to pat themselves or their colleagues on the back. They don’t notice that it comes across as subtly off-putting to the reader — particularly on a website where every topic begins with a description of how admirable the organization (“we”) is .

The cold, hard, fact is that the reader just doesn’t care; the reader wants to know what’s in it for him or her. Organizations like Amazon.com recognize that. They don’t tell you how they’ve been working their tails off to make the site convenient for you. They tell  you about all the things you can now do with their site.

Example: “We have chosen iPad photography as the topic for the next meeting.” focuses on the exclusive little group making decisions. It could be recast to use a genuine, inclusive “we”: “We’ll be discussing iPad photography.” Even better, it could focus on the website visitor:  “Bring your experiences and questions about iPad photography to the next meeting.”

My client recognized the change of tone that resulted, and said she was going to give it a try.

What do you think? Does shifting from the organizational “we” to a customer-focused “you” make a significant difference? Are there downsides to it?

Explore the writers of the Clarion West Write-a-thon

Here are a few early progress reports from Clarion West Write-a-thon participants:

We’re off! 228 of us, pursuing writing, editing, and publishing goals for six weeks to attract donations for the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

I encourage you to explore the participants’ pages, where you’ll find excerpts from the work of pros like Andy Duncan, Vonda McIntyre, Elizabeth Bear, Louise Marley, Rachel Swirsky, Kelley Eskridge, and Nisi Shawl, and emerging stars like Vylar Kaftan, J.M. Sidorova, and Cat Rambo (to name just a very few of the 228 participants).

In the next few days, I’ll be posting here about my own Write-a-thon goals — which including writing three short stories inspired by Jonathan Coulton songs and publishing them on Writer Way. (Thank you, Jeff and Allen, for your generous support!)

Here are a few early progress reports from Write-a-thon participants:

Brenda Cooper is writing 1,000 words a day on a novel — plus training for the STP (Seattle-to-Portland) bike ride event.

Janine Southard is writing four short stories and outlining a novel.

Sandra Odell is writing 2,000 words a week on her novel while focusing on taming her Inner-Bitch (er, Inner-Editor).

Gabrielle Harbowy, who edits novels for a living, is going to start writing one.

I’m writing this post from the 4th Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, where I just had the honor of moderating a writers workshop on storytelling that featured Oneal Isaac, Scott Lynch, Beth Meacham, and Mary Robinette Kowal. I was so inspired by their presentations and Q&A with the workshop attendees that I’m tempted to repair to my room and spend the rest of the weekend writing. But there are too many other great panels to attend, such as “Story Templates and the Folk Process” — which is starting in 10 minutes.

Do you write speculative fiction?

Signup is open for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, a “shadow workshop” that runs in tandem with the Clarion West Writers Workshop (June 17 – July 27) and raises money to support Clarion West.

Clarion West logoIf you write fiction, there’s a fabulous opportunity in the next few weeks to join with writers from around the world who are forming an online “shadow workshop.” It runs in tandem with the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle June 17 though July 27.

During the six weeks that the workshop’s in session, participants in the “shadow” group will be pursuing their individual goals for writing (such as outlining a novel, writing to achieve a daily or weekly word count on a current project, editing a completed piece, or submitting work to agents, editors, and publishers). The shadow project is called the Clarion West Write-a-thon, and each participant, in addition to writing, can raise money to support the Clarion West and its scholarship program. (Note: I’m a member of the “shadow workshop” and of the Clarion West board.)

For more information about the Write-a-thon and experience of being a shadow participant, please take a look at this post by author Nicola Griffith. She talks about the experiences of writers in last year’s Write-a-thon.

To sign up as a participating writer, see the Clarion West Write-a-thon page. You’ll find directions for joining the shadow workshop, including creating a profile page with a short excerpt from your work. You do not need to be a Clarion West alumnus to participate.

Not writing this year? You can still be involved — as a Write-a-thon sponsor. To make a tax-deductible contribution to support Clarion West through one of the “shadow workshop” writers, scroll down to the very bottom of the Write-a-thon page to see the growing list of writers who have signed up to participate.

The truth about book contracts

Kat Richardson’s insider’s view of book contracts is a must read.

For those of you who plan to publish a book, Kat Richardson’s insider’s view of book contracts is a must read.

It includes step-by-step advice for how to read a contract, and who to hire to read (or renegotiate) a contract for you.

While Kat is specifically talking to writers of genre fiction, I recognized quite a few elements that pertain to nonfiction contracts as well, including writing-for-hire.

It’s a long, substantive post. Grab a cup of coffee, and start reading.