There was a book by @cstross (The Apocalypse Codex) that had a cover I couldn't stand. I checked the book out twice from the library, but every time I looked at the cover, I just couldn't make myself read it. I finally bought the ebook and, since I could just skip past the cover, and not have to see it every time I picked up the ereader, I could read the story — which I enjoyed immensely.
CW for some pretty intense eye contact, and whales.
Nobody is interested in my German writing. Perhaps you are more interested in photography. Hence a picture of an ermine in winter fur I took last year.
#stoat #ermine#MustelaErminea#WildlifePhotography#NaturePhotography #nature #wildlife#Hermelin#Naturfotografie#Wildtierfotografie
Twelfth Night has always been my favorite Shakespeare play. Most folks don't know that Shakespeare can be hella queer -- and Twelfth Night is Shakespeare at his queerest.
But even at his queerest, Shakespeare is implicitly queer, never explicitly.
So I challenged myself to take the implicit queerness of Twelfth Night and make it explicit.
The result is What You Will: A Queer-er Shakespeare.
I kept the dialog from Twelfth Night almost entirely unchanged, using action and internal monologue to bring the queer to the surface where we can all see it.
In What You Will, the cross dressing Viola becomes a trans egg, slowly realizing that Cesario is who he really is. And the bisexual disaster Sebastian... stays a bisexual disaster, but this time gets a happier ending.
What You Will is half off on Smashwords this month. Check it out today!
It's going well, I think. My current focus is editing, but Rai and I recently started re-drafting one of our stories from last winter. Progress and some fun on all sides.
Here's my most recent snippet from Planting Life:
They finished raising that section – the entire house-to-be now had walls to the height of eir knees – and Kyawtchais gratefully stood and stretched eir back. Spinning was not idle work, but a full day at the walls used more and different muscles than Kyawtchais was used to.
That, too, was like creating a family.
Together, Kyawtchais went with the gruff-one and silent-one to the outside hearth. Today, ey would stay for dinner.
To be honest, critique is about the last thing I require, atm. Feeling like an open wound on a windy day at the beach. Can I ask for some over the top encouragement instead?
Why doesn't art come with cheerleaders?
Go artists! Write that world! Paint that intangible feeling! Dance that epiphany! Whoohoo!
In case they might be helpful for anyone working on something difficult, these writing workshops are now available to download free or pay what you like (and I am very proud of them, even if they're a bit scrappy!)
Writing About Trauma Self Care
https://innerworlds.gumroad.com/l/writingtraumaselfcare
Tools for Writing About Trauma
https://innerworlds.gumroad.com/l/toolsforwritingtrauma
Part 3 begins!
Finally, the stakes come into focus.
How does it all end?
Chapter 29 of "A New Faith" is up on the website at https://tinjar.ghost.io/a-new-faith
Parts 1 and 2 are available to #download (or read online) for #free in #DRMfree#PDF and #EPUB formats
#solarpunk #hopepunk #books #bookstodon #novel #climatechange #adaptation #migration #mystery
#thriller#amwriting#WritersCoffeeClub
#WordWeavers#ScribesAndMakers
#PennedPossibilities #writingcommunity #sciencefiction
#climatefiction
Are there any skills and techniques you’ve learnt in music that you discovered are transferable to your writing and helped improve it, and vice versa?
Bonus Q: what are you singing at a karaoke?
Asks @Emmacox
1. I learned to be succinct with my choice of words in songwriting, I think, and also how words can flow together. I hope that has transferred to my writing. I like wordplay, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m still very much learning the storytelling craft, so it’s interesting to see how I can interlink the two. I’m trying to write some songs for a story I’ve written based on my north-eastern ancestry and am finding that much harder to do than when I wrote a story based around some characters in songs.
2. Probably ‘Where’s Me Jumper’ by Sultans of Ping FC. It won’t matter if it goes horribly wrong…
Answering @VampiresAndRobots
#ScribesAndMakers#TTMD
You're a teacher, which can be both the most rewarding and most emotionally taxing job. How does this influence your creativity? Is it an escape? Is it related at all?
The job is especially rewarding and emotionally taxing given that I work with learners with severe and profound learning difficulties. I always have done, and I have always been taken by the number of creative types who fall into this particular type of work. Some of our best teaching assistants have come from drama backgrounds, and I suppose the ability to separate the role from the person performing it must certainly have something to do with it. The creativity is certainly an escape from it, and maybe my work does fuel the creativity as well.
Right, settle down in your seats for this answer to a query from
You more or less answered this in a post earlier this week, but I'll ask anyway. If nothing else, it may be a chance for those who missed the earlier post to hear about it.
Have you found the sound of Riduna yet?
So… this is probably the most complex combination of music and writing I have embarked upon so far.
My family-in-law have, for decades and generations, holidayed on a tiny island in the English Channel (pop 1800), although we’ve not been there now for ten years but that’s a different story.
One year, whilst camping - and bearing in mind there is NOTHING to do on the island - I started to imagine a fictional music scene on the island; band names, song titles, back stories. When we returned I dug out my studio and recorded a compilation album called ‘The Riduna Sound’, roping in the kids and Mrs Nocash in varying degrees of reluctance to add to the album. I then burned the album onto CDs which were sent it in the post to the rest of the family, with a fictional press release, and waited for the penny to drop. It took longer for some than others…
I then set about writing the story of someone chancing upon this CD, and embarking on a search for ‘The Riduna Sound’, and had half a dozen copies printed up, which we dropped through letter boxes on Christmas Eve. The book had too many in-jokes to be more widespread, so I re-edited it a couple of years ago.
The plan is to self-publish it in the next year or so, although whether I accompany it with the original CD or re-do that, or indeed something else, remains to be seen…
I also had a Twitter page for the record label, run by its fictional manager, and started a follow-up book based on his diaries. Maybe I’ll finish that one day.
But I’ll answer Walter’s question with another question: who says it was me who looking for the sound of Riduna…?
You more or less answered this in a post earlier this week, but I'll ask anyway. If nothing else, it may be a chance for those who missed the earlier post to hear about it.
Have you found the sound of Riduna yet?
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
