Writer's Report 2.0

John Scalzi is a Science Fiction novelist and Hugo Award nominee. In his popular writer’s blog ‘Whatever’ he talks about what you really need to sacrifice in order to be a writer.

“Got a letter today from an aspiring novelist who is wondering if wanting to write means that one has to be willing to sacrifice a great deal for one’s writing and craft. Because one hears of writers who have made great sacrifices in order to work on their writing, including giving up jobs, friends and spouses in order to put their words into being. Does one have to be willing to put that all on the line for one’s art?”

Read the rest at Whatever…

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A Spanish grandmother who became an Internet sensation after dubbing herself the “World’s Oldest Blogger” has died at 97.

Maria Amelia Lopez, who died Wednesday, began blogging from her home in Galicia two years ago, winning over a large fan base of readers with her eclectic mix of commentary and nostalgia infused with a sharp wit.

Maria Amelia Lopez

She was introduced to the Internet when her grandson set up the blog as a gift to mark her 95th birthday.

“Today it’s my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog, when I was 95 years old … and my life changed … now, I can communicate and interact with the world.” she wrote on her first post on amis95.blogspot.com on December 23, 2006.

It proved a great escape for Lopez writing about personal health problems, from trips to the doctor to bouts of dizziness, to her opinion on current events and modern day life.

Using a mix of humor and nostalgia she shared her experiences of getting old and enlightened readers about life during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

Lopez blogged from her seaside home in Muxia, on the Galician coast, where she was born in 1911. Her musings quickly earned her followers from across the world and she clocked up more than 1.5 million visitors to her blog. Her fame even saw Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero drop in for a chat.

In recent months Lopez was increasingly posting video messages on her blog instead of written texts because cataracts impaired her vision.

In one of her last postings in February she said: “When I’m on the Internet, I forget about my illness. The distraction is good for you — being able to communicate with people. It wakes up the brain, and gives you great strength.”

Her family left a posthumous post, thanking readers for their support. “[There were] 880 days when her blog made her happy… the support she needed to enjoy her last days of life,” they wrote.

“When somebody leaves after 97 years, living with joy from the beginning to the end, we can’t be sad. Wherever you are, grandmother, you will read these comments, all of them without doubt. She will laugh at some, will learn with others, she might get annoyed at the specific ‘language’ used in some … but she will be happy reading all of them.”

Heather Armstrong began blogging in 2001. She was fired after writing about her job and co-workers on her blog. After eight years, more than 6,900 posts and 1.5 million visitors a month, Heather’s brutally honest and often hysterical musings have been turned into the memoir, ‘It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita’ published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment.

It’s a humorous look at life, relationships, dealing with depression, childbirth and parenthood.

In this recent USA Today interview, Heather talks about her blog and the new book:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-03-25-blogs-heather-armstrong_n.htm

Or listen to Heather on this Podcast interview from the bat segundo show:
http://www.edrants.com/segundo/heather-armstrong-bss-276/

Even better, read Heather’s daily blog entries and pics at Dooce. You are guaranteed to be entertained.

I must give Meg Gardiner author of The Dirty Secrets Club (Jo Beckett)
and the blog Lying for a Living, props for leading me to an excellent article on what it took author Jeff Vandermeer to complete the first draft of his book. A must read for novice writer’s who think revising merely means running your manuscript through Spell Check.

Link: High-level Notes After Completing First Draft

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This is an article from the December issue of Randy Ingermanson’s (creator of the Snowflake Method) Advanced Fiction Writing newsletter

[BTW: Check out the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog . It is updated frequently and filled with great information and answers to reader's questions.]

If you want to drive from Los Angeles to New York, you
need a roadmap. That isn’t necessarily an actual piece
of paper with roads drawn on it. It might be just a
series of steps to follow, like these:

• Get on I10 and drive east from LA
• Switch to I15 and drive to Salt Lake City
• Take I80 east to Chicago
• etc. (It gets complicated after that)

Now, each of those steps may take a short time or a
long time to execute. You’ll be on I10 for maybe an
hour. I15 will take you a full day. I80 might take a
couple of days. Along the way, there’ll be smaller
tasks you have to execute, such as stopping for gas,
food, motels, etc.

The important thing here is that the main steps are in
order. You’ll go nuts trying to get onto I80 straight
from I10, because they don’t connect. Try any trick you
want. You can even (groan) ask directions. It won’t
help. If you want to get from I10 to I80, you need to
take that pesky intermediate step of I15. You can’t
skip steps.

Of course, there are other ways to get there. You could
take I70 through Denver and Kansas City and Columbus
and on east. Or you could take the southern route on
I40. What won’t work so well is taking I5 up to
Seattle. That’s a little pointless, even if you drive
it really fast, because Seattle is further from New
York than LA is.

The roadmap to getting published isn’t quite like
driving across the country. It’s a lot fuzzier… (more…)

Randy Ingermanson just published another one of his great Advanced Fiction Writing e-zines for October. It covers such subjects as Story World creation and marketing your fiction through public speaking. You can download a copy of the e-zine in text or PDF format. Also be sure to check out his frequently updated and informative blog