Howdy! Every now and again I drop a resource post for writers. Blog Post 7 lists mostly free writing resources, but those are specifically for learning the craft, which includes how to query, self publish, market, etc. Blog Post 52 lists mostly free resources for self publishing. Blog Post 166 lists free lectures from a wide range of popular authors. These are all finable under the Writing subject section of my blog. While it feels like I've really covered the writing-tool bases here, it occurred to me that I haven't shown how I actively keep tabs on the writing community.

There is always a ton going on in literary land, publishing companies behaving unethically, agents being publicly called out for abusing their authority, querying, and sometimes already published authors, being revealed as having misled readers by using a false identity to market via the #OwnVoices credential, scammers feigning authority and prestige by misrepresenting themselves as major names in literary circles, etc. It's a lot every day and being less active on social media lately, I miss more than I used to.

What with the #WritingCommunity having largely dispersed from Twitter to Threads, BlueSky, and TikTok, it has been harder to maintain those connections. Once, if you were following call it 1K writers on Twitter, the app was active enough where you were bound to catch wind of relevant news organically. Alas, unless the community reconvenes on a single space, those days are done. Keeping tabs requires actual effort now, at least enough to follow or subscribe to those in-the-know.

For a brief weekly overview of recent literary drama: I follow LadyWhistleThreads (@JanaAndBooks) on the Threads app. However, she also emails her Substack subscribers with the content from her Threads, in case they don't have that app. I have the free subscription but for paid followers, I believe she goes more in detail on the drama on her Substack.

For frequent verified claims of scams or other unethical behavior impacting writers: I highly suggest adding Writer Beware to your scrolling habits. I'm following their Twitter and Facebook pages but they also maintain an active blog if you prefer the long form format. Victoria Strauss receives reports of scams, or similar negative experiences, verifies, and reports on them. I use this information in maintaining my own charts regarding which agents or publishers I should be reaching out to, and which I should avoid.

I like the options above because they're not limited to a single social media app. There are options for how to follow them. That said, while I haven't picked a single microblog for myself going forward, BlueSky allows users to create Starter Packs which are similar to the Lists on Twitter if you're familiar with those. Basically, a Starter Pack is a collection of related accounts, according to the user who organized the Pack. Packs are titled, and doubtless, there are Starter Packs of writing industry experts. I was scrolling Twitter to locate the accounts I use to get gossip & tips from but some have been deactivated, and some have been inactive for so long I can't find them via Twitters busted search tool.

As I find more free resources, I will add them here. Thanks for stopping by! I drop a new blog post every Monday. Toodles!

Newsletter

Howdy! This past week I finished my NaNoWriMo draft. It barely broke 50K and most of those words were junk but it helped me flesh out a detailed outline. Anywho, the story is essentially a YA version of Hansel & Gretel featuring Baba Yaga. It has potential but needs a restart.

I also finished my painted woodburning of a nutcracker and will finish the matching Matryoshka today. I want to make a Sirin but I'm not sure what else I'll be including by this weekend. I will be making more wood burnings, of course. I'm just iffy about which ones. As I mentioned last week, I did not get into December's First Friday in downtown Bryan and I am a bit disappointed about that. On the bright side, this means I can shop instead, which I always enjoy. Gotta support small businesses, right? And to be fair, it's a very competitive event (though it didn't used to be, before the current management >_>), and the other sellers likely lean harder into Christmas themed merch than I do. I am more of a Halloween queen.

I haven't purchased the materials for learning leather craft yet. My hands were giving me grief during October, but I took a break from woodburning & painting while I wrote for NaNoWriMo these past couple of weeks, and they've recovered. My Grammy advised wearing arthritis gloves so I'll give those a shot going forward. I've also started masking while woodburning. I'll need to when attempting to burn leather, for sure. I think I'll order the leathercraft tools, get into it, and if my hands start burning again, I'll set leathercraft aside for a little longer and work on writing instead. I have a huge backlog of novel manuscripts in dire need of revisions. Maybe it'll be for the best to work on one of those.

I'm currently reading The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami. I am really enjoying it. The story is about a man who fell in love with with a girl when he was young, only for her to suddenly disappear. Adult him finds the youthful her in an, assumedly imaginary, village she used to tell him about.

I've observed that the narrator will restate himself, explaining what was already made clear, in different words or via metaphor, not just chapters apart, but sometimes within the same paragraph. This tendency usually irks me with other authors but I've found I don't mind when he does it. I think part of why is that this text was originally written in Japanese before being translated to English, so it is inevitable that there is some awkwardness there, places where Japanese might offer more variety of words with hyper-specific definitions that aren't as accurately represented in English. This is the same grace I offer Miyazaki films and the like.

The other reason is the simplicity of the writing style. In Murakami's first novel, he wrote it in Japanese, translated that to his more limited English, before translating that back to Japanese, in order to find a more natural style. While I don't imagine he's kept up with that initial process, he does use short sentences and simple language. The ideas presented can be complicated or abstract but they are expressed so that a child might understand, and to get those ideas across, while I think he could trust the audience more, I also don't blame him for assuming us literal-minded, and in need of frequent metaphors as emphasis.

For readers unused to Haruki Murakami's works, I suggest beginning with one of his older, shorter, novels. Kafka On The Shore is a nice go-to. Murakami's fans joke about certain tendencies that appear frequently in his work. Kafka On The Shore touches on many. If you find that book too uncomfortable, he may not be the author for you and that's okay. But better to figure that out from his shorter books than from The WindUp Bird or 1Q84, which are very large.

Thanks for stopping by! I drop a newsletter every Monday.