Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization either through nuclear war, plague, or some other general disaster. Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized). –Wikipedia You start with one Main Character who has either lost everyone and everything they care about, or who soon will lose everyone and everything they…
Category: writing
Reading Like a Writer
My favorite short story writers are Issac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. These writers took the impossible and made them seem commonplace, then shoved the world off it’s axis at the story’s end. They are fun stories to read, as you never know what will happen next, but you do know something will happen. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is about her favorite stories and writers. Like many college educated writers, she is a huge fan of the Long Dead Writer, and a particular fan of Anton Chekhov. Her advice at one point boils down…
List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English
Annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness is Lake Superior State University’s yearly 15 Minutes of Fame. It’s that time of year again. For one or two days a year their servers are slammed and everyone smiles with guilt as they see phrases they have used more than once themselves. Well, maybe. As a blogger I like this kind of silliness when I am on a desperate search for something to blog about. This year the list seems a bit weak, with a couple of terms that I haven’t yet…
Gahan Wilson’s Plot Generator
Gahan Wilson is a wonderfully twisted cartoonist. I first saw his work in the pages of Playboy and later in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Gahan Wilson cartoons have a kind of sad/horrible/funny feel to them. One of the cartoons from F&SF had two robots standing over a rotting corpse sitting at a table, one of the robots speaks-He hasn’t eaten anything in weeks, I’m starting to worry about him. The Wife has been a big fan of Sci Fi for a long time and used to read the wonderfully odd Omni Magazine, where Gahan Wilson also contributed the occasional bit…
NaNoWriMo Thoughts
NaNoWriMo word count as of day 4: 8478. When I first started blogging The Wife told me that I was wasting a lot of time and words that could have been going toward The Great American Novel, or at least, a novel anyway. But the fact of the matter is that most of my blog posts clock in around three hundred words-more or less. Still, over the past few years I could have amassed enough words for a novel or two. The main difference between a novel and blogging, for me anyway, is that a novel has an ongoing thread.…
I Used to Write, Now I Blog
The influence of blogging is overall a very positive force in the media.-Garrett M. Graff If you write it and publish it, your an author. If you write it and blog it-are you wasting your time? The general rule of thumb for writing a novel is to put together a thousand words a day on your way to a hundred thousand word novel. Once you have the finished rough draft, which can take anywhere from a few months to a few years, you proof read for plot logic, tweak the tension here, relax the tension there, arrange it in a…
Read a Book Day
smakupfx made the books shown here-his work is very interesting. What was the Last Book You Read? Or more to the point, have you recently read a book at all? Maybe Read a Book Day would be a good time to start. Of course, looking at a blog is reading, just not the same kind of reading that goes with a good book. I’m totally open on this point, I’ll take any book at all. From comic book to Ulysses to the Bible. But I do want it to be a book you have started and finished, which might leave…
Robert Fulghum-What on Earth
I read All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten when it was first published twenty years ago. This was a book filled with short essays about Robert Fulghum‘s dreams and wishes and what he would do if he could do anything. As it turned out, this little book was his key to doing anything he ever wanted to do-and I feel sure, any number of things he never thought he would get to do. He followed up that first success with a couple of other books filled with his essays, which were a little less profound, since…
The Writers Strike
“I know what your thinking,” David Letterman said. “Somebody writes this crap?” A few years ago the Wife and I entered a costume contest, won trips to London, and spend a few weeks in the U.K. As Steve Martin once said- it’s like a whole other country other there. TV is different, in that it isn’t exactly commercial, you have to pay some sort of tax for it. This means that the British TV networks worked for the British Government. It seems there have been a few changes in the system, but I haven’t really kept up. When we were…
Tips for Better Writing and The Readability Tests
George Orwell was like many writers-he didn’t like the way other writers wrote. Writers look at the written word a bit differently from readers. Readers might like writing filled with enough grammatical errors to make English teachers reach for their rulers. Writers hate laziness in other writers. Mark Twain hated other writers. Edgar Allen Poe complained about the writing skills of authors that have long since been forgotten. Hemingway’s short attention span style of writing was a revelation. Yet when Hemingway was writing, William Faulkner was cranking out sentences that took up entire pages. Would Hemingway be a better blogger…