Tallinn

Wednesday August 2 involved a short three-hour tour of highlights of the city of Tallinn, Estonia, particularly the upper and lower parts of the Old Town.

Copenhagen and Stockholm

I’m dividing my blog entries into travelogue and writing; this is the description of the travel from leaving Kiel to touring Stockholm, with Copenhagen in between. Unfortunately wifi on the ship was sufficiently slow I couldn't upload photos in realtime, so this is several days late.

Kiel

I found out a little about Kiel a week before the trip; a researcher who lives here was visiting one of my colleagues at Queen's. He said there wasn't much to see that was old, because the city was bombed out in World War II. It was a major submarine base and submarine construction dockyard, so was a major target.

Traveling to Germany

I'm composing this on blogspot.de because I'm in Kiel, Germany for the start of the Writing Excuses Retreat 2017 --- a writing conference taking place on a cruise around the Baltic. This post is about getting here; I expect to post more whenever I have Internet access.

Workshop: Worldbuilding in Urban Fantasy with Alyssa Cooper

Over the June 3-4 weekend I had a lot of fun at Limestone Genre Expo 2017, held at St. Lawrence College in my hometown, Kingston. There are many things I may want to blog about later, but what I most want to record first is my experience at the “World Building in Urban Fantasy” workshop run by Alyssa Cooper. I’ve been struggling with writing an urban fantasy series since my first National Novel Writing Month more than a decade ago. Alyssa’s guidance and insights were very helpful; with her permission I'm posting my notes on her session.

Multiple right answers

Someone posted this image on Twitter yesterday, and I surprised myself by reacting so strongly to it that I had to blog about it:

The Writer in Red has some important points (which I'll discuss below), but the initial bald statement "one of those people is wrong" really irritated me. The image is trying to get across an important pedagogical point: There can be more than one "right" answer to a problem.

NaNoWriMo 2016

In theory I've been participating in NaNoWriMo this month, but up until a few days ago I was only getting a few hundred words per day. Mostly it was too much to do at work and needing to rest from it on weekends, but then I realized another problem was that I wasn't happy with the story and not sure where to take it. So I picked a different story and now am excited about it.