Category Archives: Resources

Bitstrips: comic creation tool

Posted on March 25, 2008 by Keren

Always wanted to create comics but can’t draw? Try Bitstrips. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site — you make “characters” using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date. Once your strip is done, anyone can modify it — it becomes part of the commons. In the first two weeks of the site’s existence, more than 16,000 strips were created by the users of the service.

Link

Posted in Graphic novels, Resources, Websites |

io9: 8 rules for short story writing

Posted on March 12, 2008 by Keren

SF blog io9 has a list of 8 rules for writing short stories (mostly from a science fiction perspective, but valuable for all short fiction writers).

World-building should be quick and merciless. In a novel, you can spend ten pages explaining how the 29th Galactic Congress established a Peacekeeping Force to regulate the use of interstitial jumpgates, and this Peacekeeping Force evolved over the course of a century to include A.I.s in its command structure, etc. etc. In a short story, you really need to hang your scenery as fast as possible. My friend and mentor d.g.k. goldberg always cited the Heinlein line: “The door dilated,” which tells you a lot about the surroundings in three words. Little oblique references to stuff your characters take for granted can go a long way.

Make us believe there’s a world beyond your characters’ surroundings. Even though you can’t spend tons of time on world-building, you have to include enough little touches to make us believe there’s stuff we’re not seeing. It’s like the difference between the fake house-fronts in a cowboy movie and actual houses. We should glimpse little bits of your universe, that don’t necessarily relate to your characters’ obsessions.

Link

Posted in Articles, Resources, Science fiction/fantasy, Short stories |

Keep Your Copyrights – helping authors avoid abusive contracts

Posted on October 4, 2007 by Keren

Keep Your Copyrights encourages authors to avoid abusive contracts and copyright agreements with their publishers by providing easy-to-undertand legal information about copyright issues.

A creator forewarned is a creator forearmed. This site is devoted to all authors and creators of works in the United States. It aims to make clear why you might want to keep your copyrights, and to provide information both to help you hold on to your rights and to grant on reasonable terms the rights you do license.

We encourage a more proactive attitude toward copyright management. We encourage creators to understand that you start with all the rights, and that you should actively decide what you want to do with them. Your copyright in fact consists of multiple rights, and you can grant one right (or part of one right) without giving away the others. Copyright was designed to serve artists and creators, but if you give everything up, that idea can just become lip service. Worse, if you give away too many rights, the business to whom you gave up your rights can use your copyrights against you to hinder your later efforts to create or to get paid.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Posted in Resources, Websites |

Guardian poetry workshop with Fiona Sampson: listening

Posted on July 3, 2007 by Keren

The Guardian has an interesting theme for their poetry workshop this month (taught by poet Fiona Sampson): putting sounds in poems.

Write and submit a poem, and you could be featured in the follow-up article and receive in-depth feedback from a professional poet.

We take it for granted that poetry and sound are intimately related. After all, the idea of the lyric is both musical and has to do with a peculiarly poetic “feel” or sensibility. And if the term comes from rhetoric: well, that’s an approach to writing which identifies thoughts with their forms; the sound with its fury – or nostalgia, or wit, or passion. All poetics concern themselves, to a large extent, with the organisation of sound; in rhyme, metre, assonance and so on. But making sound isn’t the same as listening – as anyone who’s ever been in an argument knows. Perhaps because I used to be a musician, this month’s workshop pays attention to the sounds around us.

Link to the Guardian article for instructions.

Posted in Poetry, Resources, Workshops |

Google Docs gets an interface upgrade

Posted on June 28, 2007 by Keren

We featured Google Documents a while ago, back when it was still Writely.  Now Google’s updated their online document and spreadsheet web app to allow better file organization.

Mark Frauenfelder, in his blog Rule the Web, writes:

Today, Google Docs & Spreadsheets has unveiled a a whole new look. Now, files are organized into folders, which makes navigating through your various documents a breeze. No more lost files.

If you haven’t given the service a look, now is an excellent time. GD&S does all kinds of nifty things that MSWord doesn’t, like let you collaborate on a document at the same time as someone else at another browser. It also saves automatically as you go, so someone could theoretically blow up your PC mid-sentence and your document would be safe, scattered around Google’s various servers. It would take a worldwide electromagnetic pulse to really get rid of a document stored with Google.

Link

Posted in Resources, Websites |

Resource of the week: 'How to write without doing any writing'

Posted on April 20, 2007 by Keren

Julie has an excellent essay about how to turn off writer’s block and just write.

No, pardon me, jot.  Or note.  Because here, you don’t do any “writing”.  You just take notes: on your surroundings, on your thoughts, on the stories you have in your mind.  Quality isn’t important – they’re just your own personal notes on whatever subject catches your fancy.
And after you have enough of these notes:

You need to switch gears and become an editor for a little bit.  Imagine that you got a promotion from being a typist to an editor. [...]  The key here is to focus on what’s in front of you and ignore who typed it.  You have no attachment to this typist whatsoever.  I repeat: do not feel sympathy for the person who sent you these notes or care about how much time the person spent typing.

The number of things you reject may be large.  I’m here to tell you that it’s ok if you pass on 99% of the stuff.  The reason gems are called “gems” is because they’re not so easy to come by.  There will always be more.  Remember to detach yourself from this no-name typist and focus solely on the writing in front of you.  Just because you’re rejecting 99% of the drivel doesn’t mean the typist stinks.  In fact, the typist is incredibly bright and talented and one day, she may even become a writer.

In short:

Step 1: Carry a notebook with you at all times.  Record what you see, hear, and think.  Keep filling up your notebook until it’s time for step 2.

Step 2: Gather your notes, pick out worthwhile things, and assemble them into a coherent whole.

Oh, you’re still there with a skeptical look on your face. I know what that look means. Isn’t what I describe just a matter of semantics?  Aren’t I just splitting hairs on the meaning of “writing?”  Aren’t observing, transcribing, and revising called “writing?”  I knew it wouldn’t be easy to fool you.  Here’s the thing:  Semantics makes all the difference in the world, especially for something as gut-wrenching and emotionally-laden as writing.  Being a writer means baring your soul, leaving you naked and unprotected from scorn, ridicule, and humiliation.  Or worse: indifference.  If you write something and someone doesn’t like it, it means you’re a big, fat excuse for a writer, so pathetic that even the mule can do better.  Your soul is crushed, your ego bruised, your hopes smashed.  The minute I even begin to think about writing, I become paralyzed.  When I become paralyzed, I don’t write a single word, further underscoring just how unworthy I am of being a writer.  If I think I’m a typist doing some transcribing, it flows easily and naturally.  That is why I recommend shifting your perception about what it is that you’re doing.  It is all about perception.

So, if you want to become a writer, stop thinking like a writer and start thinking like a typist.  Got it?  Now go type!

Link (via kate blogs about writing)

Posted in Articles, Resources |

Vonnegut's rules for short stories

Posted on April 14, 2007 by Keren

Some excellent short-story-writing advice from recently deceased author Kurt Vonnegut, most of which is applicable to all writing, not just short fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Posted in Articles, Authors, Resources, Short stories |

Scribd: 'free online library'

Posted on April 10, 2007 by Keren

Scribd is a new site that lets you upload, read and share documents in a variety of formats (.doc, .txt, .pdf and much more) and perform high-quality conversions between them – to html, jpeg, even to robot-read mp3. In addition, you can also embed the content on your own website. A great way to read and share files like pdfs without having to mess around with multiple programs.

Link (via The Best Media in Life is Free)

Posted in E-books, Resources, Websites |

Copyright renewal database for books from 1923-1963

Posted on April 7, 2007 by Keren
Stanford offers a tool to determine whether books published in the US between 1923 and 1963 have entered the public domain – important for anyone who wants to digitize and distribute copies of these books, or use their content in any other way without shelling out money to do a Library of Congress search.

The period from 1923-1963 is of special interest for US copyrights, as works published after January 1, 1964 had their copyrights automatically renewed by the 1976 Copyright Act, and works published before 1923 have generally fallen into the public domain. Between those dates, a renewal registration was required to prevent the expiration of copyright, however determining whether a work’s registration has been renewed is a challenge. Renewals received by the Copyright Office after 1977 are searchable in an online database, but renewals received between 1950 and 1977 were announced and distributed only in a semi-annual print publication. The Copyright Office does not have a machine-searchable source for this renewal information, and the only public access is through the card catalog in their DC offices.

In order to make these renewal records more accessible, Stanford has created this searchable database. Building on the work done by Project Gutenberg to transcribe the 1950-1977 renewals, and on early conversion efforts by Michael Lesk, we have converted the published renewal announcements to machine-readable form, and combined them with the renewals for later years made available on the Copyright Office’s website. Note that this database covers only renewals, not original registrations, and is limited to books (Class A registrations) published in the US.

Posted in Resources, Websites |

Poetry workshop: dramatic poetry –UPDATE: Results

Posted on March 29, 2007 by Keren

Poet and translator Sasha Dugdale presides over this month’s poetry workshop at the Guardian. This time, readers are challenged to submit a dramatic poem.

I would like to encourage readers to try writing and submitting a dramatic poem.

Dramatic poetry is poetry in which a character or characters discuss a situation. It can be monologue or dialogue. The important thing is that the poet assumes the speech patterns, interests and personality of his characters when writing the poem.

Email your entries, with ‘Poetry workshop’ in the title field, to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk by midnight on Wednesday March 21. The shortlisted poems, and Sasha’s responses, will appear on the site soon afterwards.

Read the rest of the instructions here.

Update: Read the poems that made the workshop’s shortlist, along with Dugdale’s comments and reviews. Some interesting works here.

Posted in Articles, Authors, Contests, Poetry, Resources, Workshops |