Blog – Page 10 of 451

Why Speculative Fiction Is Needed Now More Than Ever

May 6, 2019May 5, 2019Business of Writing

When people think of speculative fiction, they might conjure images of sentient robots, talking dragons, dystopian societies, supernatural beings, elaborate subplots, and other staples of the stories that can be classified as “speculative.”

But speculative fiction is also an important place to explore social, political, and economic issues. The loose boundaries of the genre allow authors to address those issues and ask “what if?” — resulting in worlds different from our own in significant and specific ways, which often reflect or comment on aspects of actual society.

Now, with technology progressing so quickly (and leading to rapid social and ethical changes and dilemmas), it’s critical to use speculative fiction as a means of thinking about the future. Here’s why speculative fiction is needed now more than ever.

It can question the status quo and imagine how society could function differently

Nichelle Nichols is the actress who first played Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek — a groundbreaking role because she was one of the first black women to be featured in a major television series. During the first year of the series, Nichols was tempted to leave the show to pursue a career on Broadway. But none other than Martin Luther King Jr. convinced Nichols to stay, urging her to recognize how her role on Star Trek provided a role model for black children and women who were sorely lacking any public representation.Continue reading

Twitterific Writing Links

May 5, 2019May 4, 2019Twitterific

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Twitterific writing links are fed into the Writer’s Knowledge Base search engine (developed by writer and software engineer Mike Fleming) which has over 50,000 free articles on writing related topics. It’s the search engine for writers.

Have you visited the WKB lately? Check out the new redesign where you can browse by category, and sign up for free writing articles, on topics you choose, delivered to your email inbox! Sign up for the Hiveword newsletter here.Continue reading

Formatting Book Descriptions for Amazon

May 3, 2019April 28, 2019Business of Writing

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Just thought I’d share a tool that I’ve found really helpful lately. It’s also free, which is especially nice.

Dave Chesson from Kindlepreneur is the tool’s creator. It wrangles book descriptions on Amazon’s website. If you’re like me, you don’t want the print on the description too small. You want spacing between your paragraphs. And maybe you want some things in bold (a teaser, for example), or in italics. This tool helps with all that.

I’ve experimented with other book description tools before and still found I had issues. Or I’d try to put in the HTML codes myself and, well, I’m not a coder.

I’ve had no issues with this tool. I copy-paste my book description from a Word doc into Notepad or another plain text editor (or you could just type it into the generator, word by word). Then I paste that directly into the generator box.

I particularly liked creating a larger font. I keep my book descriptions pithy and they look better in a bigger font size.

I was so happy with the way the descriptions looked that I went back through and changed all of them. :) Yes, this took a little while, but I was pleased with the results.

Have you used Dave Chesson’s resource before? What tools do you find yourself using regularly?

A Book Description Generator Tool from @DaveChesson: Click To Tweet

7 Thoughts About Collaborating Successfully on a Novel

April 29, 2019April 28, 2019Business of Writing, Uncategorized

By Dan Brotzel, @brotzel_fiction

I met my two collaborators, Martin and Alex, at my local writing group. By coincidence, it turned out that we all lived in the same road.

As we got to know each other, I decided to share an idea. It had struck me that a writer’s group is itself quite a promising set-up for a story: all those fragile egos, all those different personalities hungry for publication, all the different sorts of writers and writing — from epic verse to steampunk, in our case.

Originally I’d thought the idea might make an interesting short story, but over time — and as my friendship with Alex and Martin grew — I started to think how much more fun it would be if we wrote something longer, together.

So I put the idea to them, and they ran with it. After a few meetings in our local pub, we had thrashed out a set of characters — we would each run 2 or 3 — and a broad structure. We knew it was to be a novel in emails, building to some sort of explosive climax, and that was enough to get us started. And so, Kitten on a Fatberg — now to be published by Unbound — was launched.

Part of the fun of the project was the element of blind collaboration. We set up a dedicated email account for the book, and each of us began firing off messages, in character. So every few days you’d go into the inbox to read an email from one of your co-author’s characters, which talked about some terrible thing that your own character had just done at the last group meeting.

You would then fire something back from your character attempting to explain or justify their behaviour — and taking great pleasure in dropping someone else’s character in it, and so on. There are 8 main characters in the book, which means lots of scope for feuds, alliances and even romances in various combinations.

Over time, the direction of the story became clearer, and we starting meeting to shape the narrative to its conclusion in a more conscious way.

The whole thing took about two years. The experience was hard work, complicated at times, but always great fun.

Here are a few things I learned along the way about how to collaborate successfully on a long-haul writing project such as a novel…Continue reading