Findingviews
Picture sales and an open notebook of thoughts from Orginal Robart
Using Research to Create Places in Your Mind:
I was reading this article from New Scientist that describes Titan and started coming up with ideas for potential stories.
Then it hit me - reading an article about a place and thinking up fiction for the environment. Its an essential practice for SF authors but valuable to any writer -as we cannot always visit every place that a story demands we talk about.
Yet in order to keep the reader interested we have to make the reader feel that they know the place. So if you want to write great descriptions about any place, practice on some extreme examples from magazines or journals, before putting pen to paper on that new killer description in your latest work.
Giving inanimate objects personality can lead to some interesting ideas and circumstances in fiction. So how would a happy or angry bullet react when being shot from a gun
New Web Site for LARP Group Twilight Realms:
Although Shared Creation focuses extensively on Internet based creativity there is a certain rightness in looking at the real world too. LARP seems to bridge the both the digital and the real.
LARP is consenual group story telling - everyone agrees to a framework of behaviour and uses it to take part in the telling of a story. Its part a very modern idea, part a very ancient idea. The bridge between digital and realworld comes in the way that concepts, stories and characters are often developed online and then played out live.
Twilight Realms is a group that does this. The world is build largely online, and then enacted at events.
Very creative, very modern, and very retro.
Discovering Independent Authors:
Bookcast launched in October last year with the aim of supporting independent authors. The timing is good. As electronic book readers become more popular, the possibility for writing and selling a book minus an publisher and printing deal becomes easier and easier. The problem as always though will be discover. You need people to know about your work, and Bookcast with its news, reviews and ability to buy the book from the review is precisely the kind of place readers need to visit to know what is going on