Link feast: all the good bits

Whenever I find useful writery tidbits, I throw them onto Facebook - but the matrix doesn't always show you what you want to see and anyway, you're too busy writing, as you should be! So here's the digest to curl up with, mug of tea in hand.


Writerly play

• Birthday scenario game: match the month and day for your scenario. I'm trapped in a prison cell with a vampire.
• Plotting flow-chart: looping round with multiple arrows through problems and actions - bookmark this one to try out with your writers' group. 

Words words words

• Word of the day: epithet 

  from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  • n. An adjective, or a word or phrase used as an adjective, expressing some real quality of the person or thing to which it is applied, or attributing some quality or character to the person or thing: as, a benevolent or a hard-hearted man; a scandalous exhibition; sphinx-like mystery; a Fabian policy.
  • n. Hence In rhetoric, a term added to impart strength or ornament to diction, and differing from an adjective in that it designates as well as qualifies, and may take the form of a surname: as, Dionysius the Tyrant; Alexander the Great.

To read

• Neil Gaiman wrote a beautiful article on why libraries, reading, and daydreaming matter - with special kudos to science fiction. "The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls."
• 10 tips for writing good prose with a writerly soul and very little bossiness. My favourites at the moment are #3: "Don’t concentrate on technique, which can be the same as concentrating on yourself. Give yourself to your story." and #10: "Be willing to surprise yourself."

To listen

• Spoof documentary on writers' day jobs before they were famous, from BBC Radio 4 (15 mins)

To look at

• Unruly's strange and wonderful blog is back, full of weird marvels to admire

To giggle

"Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchett

We've a long way to go when this is still cheer-worthy, but hurrah for George RR Martin:

Because your beautiful, densely written novel is just superb, so can we have it on a postage stamp now please?

Story-boarding at OxCrafters - oddly, for this short story, I found it easiest to draw the events from the end back to the beginning. (Not strictly a giggle but you can laugh at my ungainly cars.)

The last word:

"On every path of your future in which you actually begin to write, there comes from your pen such a flood of lives" Orson Scott Card, Heartfire

It's time to write.