clare_dragonfly | Entries tagged with other people's stuff

I have a lot of stuff to boost today!

First and foremost: The Giraffe Call! I absolutely adore

aldersprig's writing, and her monthly call for prompts starts tonight. The theme is In the City. She writes fantasy of all flavors, including lots of apocalyptic stuff. Yay!

...oh, I was going to boost the Tag Team Tarot Draw, but that's already closed. So I'll just boost another tarot draw:

whatawaytoburn has jumped on the bandwagon and is offering one card draws.

Don Corcoran is doing a Kickstarter campaign for A Road Paved In Iron, his voodoo western dime novel. I know Don from NaNoWriMo; he's a really cool guy, and what I know about the novel is really awesome, so I'm excited that he's publishing it!

shadows_gallery is asking for votes on which sketch from Free Sketch Day to refine.

aldersprig's Giraffe call is currently open! The theme is gifts, gifts, and the Gifted. Go give her some prompts so there can be more awesome stories!

alderpsrig is still posting for her Giraffe Call; read the results! They are awesome.

What do you need or want? (LJ link) Maybe other people can help.

Holiday virtual mall!

whatawaytoburn is doing Tarot and writing commissions to save some money for a trip to California.

I just passed 28k this morning on the Nano. It's going swimmingly. Very happy with the story, which has explored things I've been wanting to look harder at but didn't think would come up in this book.

aldersprig's November Giraffe Call is open! Leave her prompts for awesome writings! And send her money if you can spare it because I can't right now and I want to reach the prompt incentives! XD

NaNo total as of tonight: 11,430 words. I'm still a little behind, but I wrote just over 2000 words today, and I'm very happy with that. Especially since there were some guys playing a violent video game at the write-in today, which made it hard to focus (the violence didn't bother me; the noise did). One of the great benefits of working on two things--it's much easier for me to focus on the fanfic.

Also, look at this awesome icon

meeks made for me! Look how pretty it is! Look at the tiny blue flowers! The yellow-and-orange lilies! Look at the rose growing from the "d" in "garden"! Meeks has once again outdone my imagination.

whatawaytoburn is doing a Tarot draw. One- or three-card draws are free, but donations are appreciated, and you can get more cards for more money!

aldersprig wrote Cunning Linguist, an awesome story about the English language. (She's also written a lot of other awesome stuff for her Giraffe Call for prompts, but this one is extremely amusing and perhaps has a wider appeal.)

Are there any graphic artists reading my journal? There are some small graphics I would love to have custom made (an icon, a ticker, and donation buttons, to be specific), but I'm pretty broke. I wonder if anyone would be interested in trading custom art for custom writing. I will probably post about this in

crowdfunding but I thought I'd send the signal out to my readers first.

ETA: It occurs to me that I could also offer editing work as a swap for art, since I actually do that as my job(s)...

crowdfunding is having the first Crowdfunding Creative Jam! It's on Dreamwidth and Livejournal. Take a prompt, leave a prompt. If you leave a prompt, I might even write something to it! Yay!

aldersprig's Giraffe Call is still going on, and she's written some very cool stuff.

aldersprig's Giraffe Call for Prompts is open now. The theme is "spooks and creeps, ghosts and ghouls." She's also posting a linkback incentive story.

I also feel that while I am here I should tell you that I bought new barrettes today. They have a light blue button at the wide end, and the rest is covered in dark blue fabric with tiny stars and swirls decorating it. This is the seller's Etsy shop, though unfortunately she doesn't have any barrettes up there yet. They are super adorable and I've gotten tons of compliments. I really ought to wear barrettes more often.

Two on writing:

Dan Wells on Story Structure. I'm not much of a video watcher, unless they're short and adorable or hilarious (and educational) things to watch with my fiancé, but this one was worth it. Dan Wells articulates a simple but robust seven-point structure for fiction that can apply to both main plots and subplots, as well as any kind of fiction. You may want to have paper and pen available; I'm glad I took notes. Also, the examples are awesome--he uses The Matrix and Star Wars like any good story-structure-lecturer, but also demonstrates each point when first going through the list with Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, and later uses Othello, Pride & Prejudice, and "The Tell-Tale Heart" to demonstrate how the structure can apply to any genre. (Apparently he was going to do a Sherlock Holmes story too, but cut it for length.) The only drawbacks to the videos is there's a longish introduction to the first one, and all of them have music covering the beginning and ending; however, the cuts are such that each video overlaps a little with the one before, so you shouldn't miss any information. Unfortunately, I'm not finding a transcript, but this post appears to explain the system in brief.

And here's a blog post about subplots that I found really interesting.

One on Fringe:

Let Us Discuss How Great Fringe's Olivia Dunham Is. Seriously, do you watch Fringe? If you do, read this article for lots of smiling and nodding agreement. If you don't, watch it to learn why you really, really should.

And one signal boost:

aldersprig is doing her next Giraffe call for prompts on Saturday, and wants to know what you'd like to receive as perks for comments, linkbacks, and donations.

finch is doing a free one card draw with more cards for tips! And

ambersweet is offering services to do with knitting, Reiki, writing, and other stuff. They are moving and have had financial difficulties and could use the help.

aldersprig posted The Grove, an urban fantasy short story, now fully sponsored. This is a very cool and poignant and shivery story. You should read it!

I am still working on the requests from the writing meme post.

pippin's is insisting on being a full-blown short story. Which is fine by me!

First, a few links:
1970s women SF authors with DRM-free ebooks. That's a lot of ebooks, many of which are presumably awesome (some of them are probably just good). It's enough that I haven't even looked through the links properly yet, because it's a bit overwhelming.

Story Sketch: Shine On by

meeks. Absolutely incredible lighting. Meeks is a fabulous artist.

aldersprig is having a Giraffe Sale. Her writing is awesome! You should read it and give her money for more!

Why Hangouts on Google Plus can be Great for Writers. Very interesting idea here, getting together on Google+ to video chat and get each other writing.

I'm on Google+ now; I don't actually know how you find people on it other than letting Google suggest them for you, but my name there should be Clare Dragonfly...

In other news, I'm going on vacation! Leaving tomorrow afternoon, coming home on the 31st. My family and I are going to the Canadian Rockies. I'm really looking forward to it. We'll spend the day hiking and kayaking (and probably other activities, but those are my favorites) and at the end of the day relax in fancy hotels. Or at least we have fancy rooms in the hotels, though at least some of them are definitely super fancy. And there will be lots of gorgeous scenery of which I will probably fail to take photos. So if you post something interesting and I don't comment, that's why! However,

aldersprig, I promise I will catch up on everything you post ;)

I won an icon from the wonderful

meeks and this is what she made me! Isn't it gorgeous? The character is Taia Lucifer, hero of my upcoming (someday) series Queen of the Wasteland. I've written a bunch of other stuff in this setting, mostly to help me work things out, and also because I love apocalyptic settings. I don't think I've written anything about Taia yet, though, except for the prologue which is not posted and I might not keep anyway. Even though I really like the title, which is "The Madness of Taia Lucifer."

Anyway, you should all check out

meeks' art and comment, because if you comment you could win an awesome custom icon like this one!

Here's an interesting blog post about starting scenes with dialogue, and why you shouldn't, or at least you should give it some thought: http://talktoyouniverse.blogspot.com/2011/06/can-you-begin-with-dialogue.html

There's a cool fic exchange,

apocalyptothon, going on at AO3. (There's an LJ comm for it, but the actual exchange seems to be at AO3.) In case you couldn't guess from the name, it's an exchange for apocalyptic fic! Signups are here and tomorrow is the last day. It's limited to only certain fandoms, presumably to make matching easier, but most popular fandoms are on there. Plus, if you request NCIS, Criminal Minds, Warehouse 13, or Harry Potter fic, you might get a fic written by me! That would be awesome :D

Finally, if you're not watching

junetide, why the heck not? Posting started Monday (okay, technically it started Tuesday but

pippin is in Australia and I saw the first post on Monday), and there's a lot of awesome stuff up already, with plenty more to come--both art and fiction. There's been all kinds of genres, too, so I think there's something for everyone.

You may have noticed me giving this book four and a half stars back on my books post for April. Well, the paperback came out on May 24, and the author is having a contest to win a copy on her blog. Since I borrowed the book from the library, I would really love to win a copy! So I'm posting a more complete review and encouraging you to pick up a copy, as well as the author's forthcoming book, Between the Sea and Sky.

Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I would give this four and a half stars if I could. A very delightful book. It hit a few of my particular buttons (faeries, queen of the underworld, alternative historical fantasy Earth), but besides that it was just a very good story. It was a quick, easy read, but I'm sure part of that was just that I was enjoying it so much I wanted to find out what happened next! I also loved the fairy tale connections--Pinocchio was the biggest, of course, but I found echoes of Beauty and the Beast as well.

I have just a few quibbles. Clothing was very important in the book, at least at the beginning, but the clothing was not always described enough for me to picture it clearly; I could extrapolate from what I had to actual historical clothing, but not all of the details seemed to fit. More importantly, while it's implied that only men are allowed to become sorcerers, the one woman who seems to be able to do magic is a villain and comes to a rather horrible, if deserved, end.

I will definitely be purchasing the sequel as well as Ms. Dolamore's other upcoming book when they come out on Kindle. I hope that the sequel will delve more deeply into fairy culture and how sorcery works.

View all my reviews

meeks has posted a sketch of a scene from my online serial novel, Chatoyant College! This particular scene is from Book 1. Meeks did a better non-spoilery description of the scene than I could, so just head over there to check it out!

http://meeks.dreamwidth.org/3821.html
(on LJ: http://meeksp.livejournal.com/15987.html)

From front to back, we have: Annie, Edie, Corrie, Rico and Dawn. Look at their expressions! Their expressions are so awesome.

If she gets six substantial comments, she'll post a cleaned-up version of the sketch, which will clearly be even awesomer. So go comment if you like it! And tip if you're so inclined--she deserves it!