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.

Review: The Calculating Stars

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a really good book, and a lot of my writing friends have given it five well-deserved stars, but I found myself hesitating. I took several weeks after finishing it before writing this review, to figure out why I only wanted to give it four. It's science fiction, hard science -- Mary Robinette consulted with scientists and people from NASA, which when I first started reading SFF was my favourite subgenre. But I was uneasy, and finally figured out why.

Writing Through The Fear

Today was the annual Faculty Writing Retreat at Queen’s University’s Donald Gordon Centre, where we get to set aside a large block of time for writing. I planned to work on a technical book I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but the opening talk diverted me from that idea to write this blog post. It was all about making more time for writing, any kind of writing, and the most engaging part of the talk was about overcoming a very common cause of procrastination: fear and emotional pain.

Writing Your Character's Greatest Fear

This month I’m doing a series of daily writing exercises as part of K. Tempest Bradford’s online NaNoWriMo skills class. The first was a little tough (thinking through certain fundamental aspects of my characters, including ethnicity, social class, and spirituality), the second tougher (defining the main character’s greatest want), and the third stopped me cold: what is my character’s greatest fear? So like the archetypical scholar-nerd, I decided to do some research.

Heart scan

Last May I had a lot of medical tests in preparation for my radical prostatectomy, and several of them found "anomalies" that need further tests. Yesterday (Sep 10) was a Persantine test - a multi-part scan for heart disease using radioactive dye.