Check out Book Mooch. Here’s how it works: you list the books you want to give away. People request them, and you mail them out. Then you receive points, with which you can request the books that other people have listed. Looks like I’ve finally found a home for that copy of The Other Boleyn…
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Names by Decade
A cool little writers’ resource can be found at http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/. You can search for popular baby names by decade, birth year, and (to a smaller extent) state, meaning that you can get a list of suitable character names based on when and where your character was born. Useful!
It’s Not About The Book #1: Morocco Pics
I’ve posted the best of our Morocco pictures on Flickr. You can click the “Slideshow” icon in the upper right to view it as a slideshow.
Book Recommendation: The Last Lecture
When I was home recently, Matt gave me a copy of The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow. I devoured it over the weekend. If you haven’t already heard the story, it goes like this: Carnegie Mellon has a lecture series of long standing called “The Last Lecture,” in which it invites faculty…
Bring on the Pain
In my past two entries I’ve talked about how virtues and flaws make fictional characters lovable. But there’s another factor, one entirely separate from character, that engages the reader’s emotions and makes her care about your story people. I’m talking about pain. Well, pain, and a few other emotional situations that amp up the stakes…
Tomorrow…
Emotional factors that inspire readers to love a character: pain, jeopardy, struggle, and injustice.
Burn Down List
There are any number of scenes to write and revise before this book is done, but here is a list of some of the other tasks awaiting completion: Create map of 1928 landmarks Research Eastern religions Research 1920’s gangsters It should be a good amount of work. But that’s all right; it should be a…
Mission Statement
The purpose of this blog is to give me a place to record my thoughts about my current writing project, and about writing in general. My thoughts on the subject range far and wide, and it’ll be good to have one place where they all come together.