Gimbutas on Stone-Age Eastern Europe

A few days ago I posted a brief history of my current work-in-progress, where I mentioned I set it in a magical Bronze Age. When I created (am creating?) my society, I was (have been?) thinking about a long-lost article I read once that claimed an anthropologist named Marija Gimbutas found evidence that the culture of neolithic eastern Europe was matriarchal – and that her work was out of favour. It seemed to me that didn’t matter, since “the world doesn’t work like that” can sometimes be succesfully refuted by saying “this is speculative fiction; that’s one of the things I deliberately changed.” So I went looking for more material, and am glad I did. Here’s some of what I found.

Failure is Mandatory

In the universe of Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary webcomic (and now in our own mundane universe) there exists a book called The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. Maxim 70 is: “Failure is not an option – it is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.” In the last few years I’ve been thinking a lot about failure, and that final maxim.

Eliciting Comments from Beta Readers: ABCDE

Once you polish some piece of writing, it’s not done yet: you need “beta readers” to help you find and fix problems. I’ve been lucky to have been on two Writing Excuses cruises, where I got to workshop the first couple of chapters of two different novels, and the beta reader rules we were taught are worth passing along. We were asked to watch Mary Robinette Kowall’s video; the scheme she teaches there has since evolved into the acronym “ABCD” which a few of us alumni have expanded in to ABCDE.

Drafting a Novel: a 4-Year Journey (So Far)

 I’ve said before that I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo several times: 2006-2009, then 2012-2018, “winning” all but twice out of 11 tries. This means I’ve written 9 “NaNovels” – things that resemble novels but aren’t. In my case they’re not even complete first drafts, in that they don’t have a full beginning, middle, and end. But now I’m working hard on editing two of them together, hoping that by the end of October, 2019, I’ll have finished something. This is a brief summary of my journey so far.

Creativity and Groups

When I started writing fiction (via NaNoWriMo) back in 2006, it was mostly a solitary exercise. I would occasionally post answer to questions on some of the forums, but I wasn't really interacting with anyone about my own story beyond the occasional question about some fact or other. That all changed after the 2015 Writing Excuses cruise, where I met a lot of other writers who shared a culture shaped by the podcast and the ground rules for participation in the cruise. After that, I had regular contact with a group of people willing and able to help me work through problems or challenges in my writing. And today that leads me to think about how groups can be thought of as creative.

Blogging: Why Do It?

I got into the A-Z Blogging Challenge because of inspiration by Keith Davies, an internet contact of many years acquaintance (back to the heyday of USENET), who has been involved since 2013. That was my first and only attempt until this year; I got as far as the letter E. I accidentally got the letter A in 2018, and so far this year I’ve reached April 8 and only just started the letter B. At the expected one post a day, I can’t make it all the way to Z, and at my current rate of 1/week, will be lucky to get to E. So why bother? I spent a bit of time today exploring my feelings and working up a rationale (or rationalization; you decide!)

Articulating Your Character's Greatest Desire

Last November I had to do an exercise on writing my character’s greatest fear, and I had no idea how to start, so I did some research and wrote it up as a set of links with brief analysis/commentary. Now I’m taking a Writing the Other class with the same exercise plus another one equally or even more challenging: writing up the character’s greatest desire. So, once again, I did some research.