Having finished a draft I finally feel is, well, finished (in its way), I guess this is as good a time as any to jot down some thoughts on the project so far. Those not interested in a look at the fumbling, stumbling, and very difficult process it took me to get to the end of my first possibly-decent novel draft ought to skip this post.
So, a more general writing update: Once again: I’m doing that Clarion West Write-a-thon thing. I write a lot, and you donate money to a great fiction workshop for genre writers. (I attended in 2006 and it was invaluable to my growth and my starting to take my writing more seriously, especially in terms of sending things out.) If you’d like to sponsor me, please go here. If you’re my top sponsor, you’ll get a cameo in the book… probably being killed in a terrible way (though the book’s been pretty devoid of any killing so far… probably a good thing, …
Yeah, I’m doing that Clarion West Write-a-Thon thing. The goal is to raise funds for Clarion West, the excellent SF writing workshop I attended eleven years ago. This year I’m working on the same thing I was working on the last time I signed up for the write-a-thon, though I am working on a new draft of it. A lot of the vague outline is the same, but some of the details differ: https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011840873119744 https://twitter.com/KateSchaeferZ/status/878011993172484096 As I noted (in the full conversation with Kate, which for some reason I can’t seem to embed here), the evil plotting Habsburgs are out, …
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of writers of fantasy talk about historical female warriors—the historicity of women marching into battle alongside men—and there’s obviously value in looking at history, because there are plenty of dumbasses out there who will be quick to say something stupid like, “But women didn’t march into battle! That’s dumb!” There will be nitwits who will say it’s feminist claptrap, or unbelievable, or implausible, or whatever. (I mean, I suppose we should spend time correcting such ignorance and stupidity when we encounter it, at least occasionally, right? So: yes, it is plausible. There definitely were societies where women …
A discussion of the parallels between cybermob behaviours and the original mobs of Georgian London. The parallels are pretty profound, and maybe there’s some lessons to be learned from how all of this was dealt with the first time around.