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"Male author" and "male doctor" are not offensive terms. It's simply a way to differentiate them from normal authors and doctors.

A Little Feminist Check Re Discrimination

I botched it tonight.

Someone asked our panel about writing in a traditionally male-dominated (both as authors and heroes) genre, as a woman. And several women writers were invited to answer, but with the clock ticking on the last moments of our chat time.

I was discombobulated by trying to formulate both a comprehensive and brief answer under the countdown, and even more so by another panelist’s previous assertion that white males were the cause of the downfall of society — a statement I found untrue as well as unfair to the white male panelists sitting on either side of me at the time, not freaking out about being outnumbered on the panel.A Little Feminist Check Re Discrimination

vintage travel poster style image of Skellig Michael with text Come Write In Ireland

Things to Know About Self-Publishing

Here are some of my thoughts about getting started in indie publishing! Feel free to agree or disagree with me over there, fellow writers — comments welcome! http://rmfw.org/5-important-things-to-know-about-self-publishing-part-1-by-laura-vanarendonk-baugh/ and http://rmfw.org/5-important-things-to-know-about-self-publishing-part-2-by-laura-vanarendonk-baugh/ If you want to hear more from me about self-publishing, make sure you check out the August 2017… Things to Know About Self-Publishing

vintage travel poster style image of Skellig Michael with text Come Write In Ireland

Come Write With Me! in Ireland!

vintage travel poster style image of Skellig Michael with text Come Write In IrelandSo we’re closing on the biggest gift-giving occasion of the year, and you don’t know what to get that writer on your list? What about an investment in their writing career? Nothing says love and encouragement and “I believe in you!” like a contribution to their goals. (And reading their work. But that’s much harder to wrap.)

If you are the writer, feel free to leave this page open on a conspicuous monitor or maybe even send a helpful link.Come Write With Me! in Ireland!

Writers Learn EVERYTHING.

I know I’ve talked about the fun and eclectic nature of story research before, but it’s worth returning to. Topics I have researched for this single short story include but are not limited to: the Devils Hole Pupfish the history of Chinese bronze casting the natural history of Kazahkstan cassowary attacks the destructive “Cultural… Writers Learn EVERYTHING.

written comments wanting more after cliffhanger

#WIPjoy Day 14: Cliffhanger

Share a cliffhanger? I’ll keep this short, in the spirit of #WIPjoy, but here’s Euthalia’s first day in the Norse village, beating out communication with the very few words she knows with a kind older woman.

It was fresher than the boat’s provisions, at least, as they had saved the spices and treats to bring back to the village. And Euthalia, no longer surrounded by dozens of strange male warriors, found herself relaxing enough to feel real hunger. She devoured the bread.

“Good, good,” praised Birna. She nodded. “Eat. Tomorrow, slagtoffer.”

Euthalia did not know the word. “Slag — what?”

Birna smiled, a little tightly, and drew her hand across her throat.

Well, then.

#WIPjoy Day 14: Cliffhanger

Miyazaki & Story

I’m not a huge Hiyao Miyazaki fan — okay, I haven’t even seen all the standards! — but I really like some of what he says here about story in general and about stories for children. And what he says about stories of fantasy and monsters requiring the… Miyazaki & Story

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. - Earnest Hemingway

Writing Games

Being a writer is easy. It's like riding a bike. Except the bike is on fire. You're on fire. Everything is on fire and you're in hell.

So I came across an interesting game premise recently.

Well, not a game, per se. There’s no gameplay and no storyline and no final boss battle. There’s no leveling and no skill-building and no farming. No gold, no XP. Instead, it’s just a virtual environment to be explored like an open-world game, for the purpose of prompting would-be writers to actually write.

Lots of people want to write but are then intimidated by the blank page. And traditional writers’ adages don’t necessarily help.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. - Earnest Hemingway

Enter Elegy for a Dead World, a game to encourage novice writers to shut off the self-doubt and just write.

Writing Games
BAIT by Laura VanArendonk Baugh. BAIT. They eat us to live. We eat them to live forever.

Writer Brains and Research

Jules Verne, French science fiction writer of ...
Jules Verne, the godfather of plausible speculative fiction. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Fantasy is even harder to write,” I alleged recently, “because you have to make the science work.”

If the science in a story isn’t plausible — whether you actually call it science, as in hard sci-fi, or whether it’s simply background dressing or setting, as in a romance set aboard a diving boat — the rest of the story won’t be plausible, either. In the romance above, for example, even if the story is supposedly just boy-meets-girl, if the couple blithely dives hundreds of meters without special equipment and resurfaces without ill effects, I’m not going to buy the happily-ever-after.Writer Brains and Research

old typewriter welded onto a chain pedestal at the Bottle Tree Ranch

Found Story Bits

Sometimes you walk away from a story in progress for a little while — in this case, because I’ve been working a lot and traveling — and you forget what you were doing. And then you come back, and you read over what you had, and you’re like,… Found Story Bits