Sharp Words

Some numerical links today (it was a coincidental connection to start with, but too good not to use):

• “10 Ways to Frame Your Words” – Confident Writing – another excellent blog post from Joanna Young, about how to present your writing by ‘framing’ it
• “36 Poetry Writing Tips” – Writing Forward – Melissa Donovan shares some great tips for improving your poetry writing; some of them I follow already, some need to be added to my personal habits
• Friday Flash 55 – Mr. Knowitall – meme time! write a story in 55 words
• “75 Books Every Writer Should Read” – Online Universities – I shamelessly stole this link from Magical Words, because it’s a damn good list… and I really need to read some more of these (*hugs my Strunk & White*)

And as always, just for fun…

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• IKEA changes its font – The Guardian – I’ve had the catalogue sitting on my dining table for weeks, and have flipped through it more than occasionally. I didn’t notice the font change – but then, I’m fond of Verdana.
• “Breathing Life Into Dead Poems” – The Truth About Lies – another brilliantly thoughtful post from Jim Murdoch, about how to read poems into life.
• Jim also introduced me this month to the blog and poetry of Dick Jones. I fell instantly in love with his poems, and equally instantly into fierce jealousy for his skill at writing them. Thankfully it wore off fairly quickly.
• A Game of Thrones by George R R Martin is a fantasy novel I really like, and it’s going to be made into a TV series – filmed in Belfast too! His LiveJournal carries details of the casting.
• And although you’re all going to get bored of this soon, November is National Novel Writing Month. If you’ve ever considered writing a novel but haven’t managed to find the time or the motivation, now’s your chance!
• Put the F-O-C-U-S back into writing! – Freelance Writing Collaborative Blogging Project – the first of a five-part series about learning (or re-learning) to focus on your writing; it’s aimed at home-workers like me, but seems pretty relevant to writing in general.

And also on the topic of working from home:

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I’m a big fan of Dinosaur Comics. This strip is particularly worth sharing, in my opinion.

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Time for a round-up of things that caught my attention recently.

• “Wearing the Many Hats of a Freelancer” – WordWebbing.com – juggling the different roles of a freelance writer
• “Writing in the Age of Distraction“  – Locus Online – a piece by the excellent Cory Doctorow about staying focussed despite all distractions
• and on a similar note: “How to Make Friends with Procrastination” – One Night Stanzas
• “Surviving Tough Times as a User-Assistance Writer” – UXmatters – how to make it through these uncertain economic times as a technical writer; has some great advice about cutting costs without damaging quality too much
• the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks – photos of examples of very unnecessary quotation marks
• 1000 novels everyone must read, as suggested by the Guardian – I’ve read a paltry 136 (39 of which were on the SF/fantasy list),  so there are now some new things on my to-read list..

And finally (I’m starting to feel like the Two Ronnies, doing this bit each time), the kind of editor you really don’t want to have:

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I do have a whole set of content-full and (hopefully) interesting posts planned for this month. Unfortunately, all my plans have been scuppered by the horrible cold I developed last Friday and which has kept me mostly languishing in bed ever since. (And I’ve read 7 books in 4.5 days – eeek.)

So instead of my interesting posts, you get some links to other people’s interesting posts:

• “The ecofriendly font that saves on ink” – The Guardian -a new font designed to save ink when documents are printed out; it seems like one of those very obvious ideas!
• “The Kitchen Full of Slush” – Editorial Anonymous – a re-run of a visualisation exercise in what 15,000 manuscripts (e.g. the number a publisher might receive in a year) looks like
• “How to Deal with Cranks, Flamers and Trolls” – Men With Pens – how to react and how to not react to comments online
• “How Do You Know When the Words Need to Go?” – Confident Writing – the cutting room and your inner editor
• “1o Tips to Improve Your Fiction Writing Skills” – Writing Forward – good advice in a guest post from Kelly Kilpatrick

And this made me giggle hysterically, remembering the Scrabble match we played at my last job where the first word down was something with an I in it, and the next person to play had the letters V A G N blank S… Well, it got them their 50 point bonus! [Click Continue Reading if necessary to see the cartoon.]

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So much for returning to a normal schedule once NaNoWriMo was over! My excuse, I suppose, is that I’ve been busy both with work and with catching up with my ‘real life’. Sadly, I haven’t done any proper writing since November 30th although I have made a start on my redrafting (and I keep having ideas).

I will get back into the blogging habit very soon though, as I have quite a few ideas I want to use up. But in the meantime, here are some of the things I’ve liked recently on the net. (I say recently but some are more than a few weeks old – sorry. I’ve been saving them.)

• “Being a Writer Means…” – CopyWrite – what other people think of us writers
• “Authors’ mews: writers and their cats” – The Guardian – because yes, an awful lot of writers seem to have cats (and dogs too, to be fair), and to list them in their biographies; why do we do it?
• “Words and What They Really Mean” – Emerging Writer – an excerpt from The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms in which the explanation of terms might not be as expected
• “The Right Way to Work at Writing From Home” – Get Paid to Write Online – a guest post with sound advice on successfully working from home
• “The Doldrums” – Storytellers Unplugged – how to keep going through the writer’s doldrums
• “When Adjectives are Necessary” – my perennial favourite Confident Writing – why, how and when to use or remove adjectives from your writing

And finally… Can you write a book in which the words in each chapter all use only one vowel? A Canadian poet did [story on the BBC]. (The book only has five chapters – he should have written it in Welsh and got the full seven vowels instead!)

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