Well, sort of.
I just got word from my apprentice, Rebecca, that the administrivia has been settled. I’m officially teaching an extracurricular writing workshop this fall at my alma mater, Christendom College. It’ll be on Wednesdays from 6:30 to 8:30. View full article »
Over at Minimum Wage Historian today, we have the story of Jackie Robinson. If you don’t know who he is, click the link. If you know who he is, you’ll be clicking the link anyway.
I remember reading his story for the first time when I was in sixth grade, and I didn’t understand it. I literally could not comprehend the idea that someone wouldn’t be allowed to play baseball because of skin color. I don’t mean that I just didn’t “get” it — I mean that I read the biography I was given in class and didn’t notice anything different about him. I concluded the other people were just mean. It was literally years before it finally clicked and I realized Jackie Robinson’s story was the first time I’d ever read about racism.
You’re at a convention, doing what everyone at such an event does sooner or later: waiting on the elevator. While engaging in small talk with the lady next to you, you find out she’s a senior editor at your favorite publishing house. You decide to pitch your book to her. Problem is, you’ve only got a few moments while you both step into the elevator — and she’s probably heard pitches about books just like yours. Can you describe your novel in thirty seconds and still make it interesting? View full article »
I just discovered a lovely little blog by a writer named K. Marie Criddle. In particular, I thought I’d share a little illustrated poem she made about the writing process.
NOW BACK TO WORK! *cracks editor’s whip on self*
No, this isn’t a post about DC’s latest attempt to be hip. I’m not much of a DC fan, whether we’re talking about the comics company or the city I practically live in, and I wasn’t much interested in their comics continuity even before they tried to revamp it.
My friend Ben Hatke (who draws Space Girls for a living), however, is a DC Comics fan. A while back, he redesigned some of his favorite heroes for fun and practice, and recently his Supergirl wound up on Project Rooftop, a website full of people who do this sort of thing for fun and practice. Actually, he gave you not just one but two different Supergirls, and explains what he’d do if he had the chance to restart his own DC continuity. Go check it out.
And then go buy his books, particularly if you know any little Space Kids of your own.
Well, BrickFair is over for this year, and it was pretty good. Actually, it was a blast. I met some new people, and plan to collaborate with some of them next year on the Castle theme. I like displaying “civilian” stuff; most people who build in the Castle/Knights theme build, well, castles and knights. I like adding in the peasants, the market town, etc. In fact, here’s my modest display.
Because every medieval Lego minifigure needs a place to shop, listen to music, and have a bar fight.
Random trivia: a town could be, and often was, smaller than a village. A village is where most of the people in an area lived. A town is where the market was, and people from different villages would go there to buy and sell. That’s why the phrase “go to town” means spending a lot of money.
This particular scene had a lot of little details, but my favorite was the barfight in the inn. On market day, a town’s population would swell, often causing tensions to flare.
Pow!
I also had two thieves, a bakery, a blacksmithy, a group of musicians entertaining a crowd, merchants with stalls, and little things happening all over (like a minotaur fighting another minotaur . . . okay, it’s not 100% historically-accurate). The piece of paper you see hanging off the table was a list of things for kids (and adults) to find. It was to let them have a fun little game and feel awesome when they found everything — and it also meant more people would stop and look at what I did instead of moving on immediately to see the more impressive stuff right next door. I’m sneaky that way.
This was next to me, making me look bad. It was made by a fourteen-year-old-girl. I feel completely inadequate. *sob*
But as I said, next year I’ll be teaming up with some others to work on a collaborative medieval display, hopefully with a focus on towns and medieval life. One guy in particular, Charlie (there with his kids because he’s an awesome father), plans on coordinating to the extent that we have matching styles for buildings in our landscape. We’ll have more buildings, more people, more activity, more landscape . . . I don’t know what it’ll look like just yet, but it should be fun.
I’m adding at least a chapel and a stables next year. I might even be able to add a watermill, but we’ll see how things work out. I still need to reorganize my collection into a new space in my house. Right now, it’s hard to remember where I put things!
I’ll be adding more pictures later on. Hopefully that means “soon,” but I haven’t even posted last year’s photos on Facebook yet. I may add some to Flickr, and I’ll definitely be posting to the Novel Ninja Facebook page.
Right now, though, I need to prepare for New Jersey tomorrow, at the Catholic Marketing Network; and after that, I go demonstrate the Fate Core RPG system at Labyrinth Games on Saturday. After that, I need to write a book and prepare to teach a non-credit workshop at my alma mater this fall.
Oh, and edit. And maybe post more about writing for you guys. Yeah. Lots of stuff to do!
I did not give this post a more obvious name, because then I would have to list an eighth habit of highly productive writers: avoiding C&D letters from people who have successfully trademarked the phrase “7 Habits.” (No, really.)
This is a long post, but it’s also a complex topic. I thought about splitting it into other posts, but I figured that keeping it in one place was better for you than padding my post-count.
Being a professional creator is a different job from, well, pretty much every other job. There are no set hours, no set workspace, not even a single set of rules that works for everyone. It’s a job that requires dedication and persistence, and the development of particular habits that may, in Aristotelian splendor, grow into virtues.
It’s a job where success is not measured in time spent, but rather your output; so if you’re trying to get paid for your work, then you know that every moment you don’t spend working is a moment you won’t get paid for later. Taking a sick day doesn’t mean your coworkers have to pull your slack — it means you don’t get anything done. Period. It’s not just a good idea to maximize your productivity. It’s vital.
I’ve collected some habits below that may work for you. I guarantee that not all of them will. It’s an easy guarantee because some of them are contradictory — but that’s the nature of being a professional creator. Some things that work for you won’t work for anyone else.
Because of that, I have another guarantee: there is something you can do to maximize your productivity that is not on this list. Finding it is up to you. I’m just giving you some suggestions to try.
I’ve had this blog for more than seven months. I’ve averaged about three or four posts per month. That’s bad enough, but in all that time, I’ve kept putting off telling you about Writing Excuses.
Writing Excuses is an award-winning weekly podcast (two time Parsec, two time Hugo nominee, also nominated for a Podcast Award) that covers creative writing. It’s a bit over five years old now, and its archives are nearly 100 hours deep. If you listened to an episode every day starting now, you’d finish in just under one year (counting the new episodes that will be released weekly over that time).
Does that sound daunting? Don’t worry. Each episode is only fifteen minutes (well, okay, sometimes they run over) long — because, as they say, “you’re in a hurry, and we’re not that smart.”
The “in a hurry” part is correct. It’s hard to make time when focusing on writing, because you really have to treat it as a full-time job. Most of us already have full-time jobs, or in many cases two or more part-time jobs. Some of you are in college, which is more than a full-time job. (Hint to you college students: if you’re not devoting about sixty hours a week to school, you’re either not a full-time student or you’re in some really easy classes.) The podcast format makes it very easy to listen to a full episode, maybe two, during your commute, while you’re on your lunch break, or while you’re cooking or doing your dishes or vacuuming the house. (Though you might need earbuds for that last one.)
The “not that smart” part is . . . debatable. These guys are good. The podcast hosts are New York Times bestselling fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson (yes, that guy who finished The Wheel of Time and wrote the Mistborn series), supernatural horror novelist Dan Wells (author of the seriously wonderful John Cleaver novels, starting with I Am Not a Serial Killer, which deserves a review from me sometime), professional puppeteer and historical fantasy/alternate history novelist Mary Robinette Kowal (author of The Glamourist Histories; she joins the podcast full-time in Season Six), and science fiction cartoonist and humorist Howard Tayler (who writes and draws the award-winning and record-breaking Schlock Mercenary).
I’ve met all four in one way or another (the first two in real life, the other two via webcams, Facebook, and email). They know their stuff and they’re great to talk to. I’m not saying I agree with everything they say, mind you; just 99%.
Well, okay. 98%. That’s my final offer.
Give them a listen. Even if you don’t write fantasy, horror, or science fiction, you’ll find plenty to learn from them.
Novel Ninja 
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