Recent content by AnneL

I am giving away 5 signed copies of MOTH AND SPARK to celebrate my birthday next Saturday. I am NOT inviting 144 guests to dinner. :-) You can enter on the Bibliotropic blog. Free hardcover! Gorgeous physical book! What's to lose? US/Canada only, sorry, postage is coming out of my own pocket.

I must be the only person in the world who didn't like Name of the Wind. I quit on page 70 when there still wasn't a woman.

I just ran across these, which are excellent. I was lucky enough to have dinner with Terry last week, and let me tell you, he's a smart guy. Rules for Writers

Nearly every writer I know thinks the first draft is garbage and won't show it to anyone, AND has to keep reminding themself of this. Mine certainly are crap. One useful analogy I heard is that the first draft is shoveling the sand into the sandbox, the revisions are where you get to play with...

Huckleberry Finn Hung the Guest The Gunsmoke and the Opportunity The Labyrinth of Eternal Drapes

This is an interesting article. I need to read it more carefully before I can talk intelligently about it, but I thought it was worth sharing. New Statesman | Anxiety of influence: how Facebook and Twitter are reshaping the novel

I've been working seriously with Scrivener for the first time today, and the good news is that it makes it really easy to see the weaknesses in my structure. The bad news is (all together, now) it makes it really easy to see the weaknesses in my structure. I suddenly have a lot more work in...

MOTH AND SPARK is pretty traditional fantasy with magic, politics, romance, dragons and a strong, smart, female lead. My WIP, which is a sequel, is heavier on the politics, lighter on the romance, and uses magic based on shamanism but is still fairly traditional. Next couple projects may not be...

I wasn't suggesting a *need* for a name change, just saying what the word implies to me and what I would expect to get if I put something up, which would be oohs and aahs and so forth, not critique. If the name is "Showcase" and the content is mostly critiques, that may be sending mixed messages...

Some random thoughts: I suspect one of the reasons criticism devolves into nit-picking is that nit-picking feels like it's being helpful when a reader doesn't like a story but still wants to have something to offer. Nit-picking combines the human compulsion for finding errors with the desire to...

A lot is going to depend on how the slaves were used. In "New World" slavery, slaves on the Carribean sugar plantations died at a much higher rate than slaves in mainland America. Until the slave trade was abolished, the sugar plantation people just treated slaves as disposable objects rather...

Someone who went to St. john's college and studied ancient greek and philosophy and spends the first half of freshman year talking about the logos and the eidos of pretty much everything. By senior year everyone has moved onto dialectic.

Audiobooks -- My novel is available as an audiobook at B&N, but the price is significantly higher than either Amazon or iTunes. If this is typical, that doesn't seem viable for anything except maybe hugely popular authors. I am not an e-book reader yet, so I have no decent thoughts on that, but...

I just wrote up a blog post on why I write fantasy and kind of surprised myself with the answer once I got to digging down into it -- turns out that there's a real philosophical underpinning to it regarding it being a space that opens up wonder and potential. Here's the post, if anyone wants...

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