Joliene asks: [What] drives your writing and keeps the juices flowing? What are the project ideas you have in the works, now that The Walker Papers is being put to bed??? Occasionally what my publisher is looking for drives my writing ideas–that’s what prompted the Strongbox Chronicles, for example, and it’s behind one of the projects I’m putting together now. Far more often, though, it’s a random comment or thought that ends up getting terribly out of control. :) I’ve mentioned before that the Walker Papers were born out of…
Tag: industry essays
Reader Questions: Doing it all
Thirzah asks keeping kick-ass real? Why is it ok to have a hero/ine shoot people in fiction, when we’re opposed to guns & violence in real life? Well, I write about a god-fighting shaman, so I’m not sure how *real* I keep kick-ass, but… :) I think it’s all right for us to explore violence in fiction precisely because we don’t in real life. It’s a way for us to imagine and experience things we actually really hope we don’t encounter in real life. A lot of fiction is about…
Character Development
A while back, I put forth a general call for questions about writing that people might want to ask me, and, er, I just remembered that I had the list stored, so I thought I’d answer one! :) Heather asks: Character inspirations – from whom did you draw the personality traits of Joanne, Gary, Morrison, Margrit, Alban, Janx, Daisani, etc. This one’s particularly entertaining because Heather’s a high school friend of mine who has never been able to see herself or anybody she knows in any of my characters, so…
fan fiction
I should not even post this, because it is a shitstorm in the making, but OMG. Sharon Lee/ of Sharon Lee & Steve Miller is doing an open Q&A, and posts a response to a question about fan fiction over here. Fan fiction is an incredibly touchy topic, and I thought Sharon responded with an enormous amount of grace and intelligence in her explanation of why she doesn’t like or support fan fiction of their universe. I should not, of course, have read the trackback links on the blog entry.…
Herein lies a rant.
Look, I don’t know why it is that I get bent out of shape more easily over injustices in comicbookland than in sffland, but I pretty much do. I’ve certainly identified myself as a SFF reader longer (although by only half a decade or so, probably), but somehow comics tend to hit me right in the outrage. Here is today’s link hitting me in the outrage. The short version is that it’s Mark Millar (whom I have met and who is *insanely* charming in person), Todd McFarlane, Len Wein (the…