easternpine

[easternpine]

What is it with some speculative fiction authors and feeling the need to incessantly beat you over the head with THE MESSAGE. Like, I get that THE MESSAGE is really important, and I agree with you that it's important, but could you like, work it in more naturally? Trust your readers to pick up THE MESSAGE via your craft? Stop writing like you're writing an essay or a treatise with worldbuilding? It's a shame to see a great premise turn into such eye-rolling and clunky reading.

On another complain-y note: published authors giving writing advice to other writers should probably stop bagging on English class and calling it "boring." Can it be boring? Sure, especially if you have bad teachers or professors (I was lucky to have awesome ones who sparked my love of literature, but that's just me). But you are WRITERS. It's what you do for a living! Why, in a time when literacy rates are dropping, would you continue to push the harmful narrative that English is "boring"?? I can't help but think this is yet another way in which we end up with more of the same-same, poorly written, trite novels over and over and over and over and over again. AUGH.

[easternpine]

*Write write write write write write write*

did I eat?

*write write write write write write write write write*

crap, I didn't

*write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write*

oh well

*write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write write*

[easternpine]

Writing as a complex act

Writing is unlike any other art or craft I've ever undertaken. It can be infinitely complex, drawing on an plethora of skills and expertise to create a single, unified piece. First, there are the basics of plot, character, and setting. These are fundamental and require careful attention to develop effectively.

But equally important are prose, pacing, dialogue, POV, and style. Even just taking one of those elements—prose, for example— it can be further broken down into several parts: grammar, punctuation, word choice, cadence, and sentence structure. How does the word choice or cadence serve the character? The mood? The genre?

What about more complex considerations like tone, mood, motifs, and themes?

Then there are practical areas like research (historical or anything outside of you area of expertise) or editing and proofreading. Or just keeping track of all the different elements and making sure they work together, that they’re not contradicting one another or forgotten.

And not only does writing demand more linear thinking, but it also requires the ability to switch between linear and non-linear modes often. I need to be able to daydream about this scene that takes place in a freezing meadow—imagine the cold, the bare vegetation, how the characters interact with the environment—but I also need to move the reader through the scene in an interesting and logical way. I can’t just keep going on about icy droplets and glittering snow and red cheeks.

It's like I'm holding all the strings, and I have to keep them from tangling into a knotted mess.

Anyway, all this as a long way to say: writing is hard, but that’s what makes it so satisfying when you’re done.

[easternpine]

Julia Armfield on The Writing Life

I read Our Wives Under the Sea this year and was instantly in love with her writing. I feel like she and I have a lot of similar approaches, though obviously she is a published author and I'm just some shcmoe on the internet 😅 Really great interview with her here. She definitely doesn't hold any punches on her opinions, which I appreciate!

[easternpine]

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

One of my best reads this year.

I don't know what to say about it, other than what I've already said in my review on Storygraph, but suffice it to say, I was in awe (and tears 😭) by the end.

Some of my favorite passages:

“Just listen to these people. You'd swear they understood each other though not one of them has any idea what their words actually mean to another.”

“Death was in every fibre of these creatures. It was hidden in their languages and at the root of their civilizations. You could hear it in the sounds they made and see it in the way they moved. It darkened their pleasures and lightened their despair.”

"Hermes's thoughts turned to Prince. How odd that such a perceptive creature had imagined the death of a language would mean the death of its poetry. For the immortals, all true poetry existed in an eternal present, eternally new, its language undying. Having once been uttered, Prince's verse would live forever."

[easternpine]

The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction

Well this was a read. A bit depressing as a writer, but maybe some hope in the end?

Make sure to read the comments section too - some great discussion happening there.

[easternpine]

YOOOOOO! Vancouver Writer's Fest: October 20-26th, 2025

*stares longingly at calendar*

really wish I had a writer friend to go with 😑 I might actually be able to go this year!

[easternpine]

why does oscar wilde take 150 pages to write something he could literally say in a paragraph

[easternpine]

I assure you: somebody, somewhere, is on the exact same wavelength as you are.

[easternpine]

Logophilia

I like words. I like to keep lists of words I find pleasing. I keep lists of words I find interesting. I keep lists of words in categories so that I might refer to them later when I'm searching for the right one. I have a problem with words.

[easternpine]

The latest initiative I’ve been working on with my colleagues at the Federation of BC Writers—and although the programming will be on Pacific time, it is open to writers everywhere. I’m going to be one of the mentors.

WHAT'S INCLUDED:

6 open mics

7+ accountability check-ins

3 workshops

4 story sessions

40+ writing sprints at different times of the day and days of the week

a private, moderated community to work through challenges, cheer each other on, and engage in writerly conversation

planning sessions to help you get started

a web-based point system to keep you motivated (with prizes)

access to workshop recordings, articles, and motivational posts

a wrap-up party

certificate of completion

(Prices are in Canadian $, which translates to a big discount for Americans!)

[easternpine]

"just write a little every day" ok but what if i write nothing for 3 weeks and then suddenly type like i’m being hunted by god

[easternpine]

This is your daily writer's reminder:

BE SPECIFIC

BE SPECIFIC

BE SPECIFIC

BE SPECIFIC

BE SPECIFIC

BE S P E C I F I C

[easternpine]

Solenoid - do we likes it or hates it?

I think we hates it.

[easternpine]

Cadence, cadence, cadence, cadence, cadence...

I feel compelled, even when I'm writing my dumb fanfiction, to read and reread and speak my sentences out loud. I need to hear how it sounds, how it works with the breath. I will write and rewrite a paragraph so that it flows smoothly. Cadence matters to me. Sentence structure matters to me.

But guess what? NO ONE CARES! They really don't!

But I do it anyway because I care... It is absolutely rage inducing.

[easternpine]

"Big Red Son" by David Foster Wallace

"Big Red Son" is the first essay in Wallace's collection, Consider the Lobster. It's a long commentary on the American porn industry, so I won't repeat any of that here, but here is a description of Las Vegas that tickles my fancy.

(And no matter what your opinion of DFW as a person, or DFW fans, there's no denying that he was a gifted writer. His essays reflect that more than his fiction, imo.)

As you know if you’ve seen Casino, Showgirls, Bugsy, etc., there are really three Las Vegases. Binion’s, where the World Series of Poker is always played, exemplifies the “Old Vegas,” centered around Fremont Street. Las Vegas’s future is even now under late-stage construction at the very end of the Strip, on the outskirts of town (where US malls always go up); it’s to be a bunch of theme-parkish, more “family-oriented” venues of the kind that De Niro describes so plangently at the end of Casino. But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. Vegas Populi: the opulent, intricate, garish, ecstatically decadent hotels, cathedra to gambling, partying, and live entertainment of the most microphone-swinging sort. The Sands. The Sahara. The Stardust. MGM Grand, Maxim. All within a small radius. Yearly utility expenditures on neon well into seven figures. Harrah’s, Casino Royale (with its big 24-hour Denny’s attached), Flamingo Hilton, Imperial Palace. The Mirage, with its huge laddered waterfall always lit up. Circus Circus. Treasure Island, with its intricate facade of decks and rigging and mizzens and vang. The Luxor, shaped like a ziggurat from Babylon of yore. Barbary Coast, whose sign out front says cash your pay-check — win up to $25,000. These hotels are the Vegas we know. The land of Lola and Wayne. Of Siegfried and Roy, Copperfield. Showgirls in towering headdress. Sinatra’s sandbox. Most of them built in the ’50s and ’60s, the era of mob chic and entertainment-cum-industry. Half-hour lines for taxis. Smoking not just allowed but encouraged. Toupees and convention nametags and women in furs of all hue. A museum that features the World’s Biggest Coke Bottle. The Harley-Davidson Cafe, with its tympanum of huge protruding hawg; Bally’s H&C, with its row of phallic pillars all electrified and blinking in grand mal sync. A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange—of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost. Nor let us forget Vegas’s synecdoche and beating heart. It’s kitty-corner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass out on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self. It’s breathtaking. The winter’s light rain makes all the neon bleed. The whole thing is almost too pretty to stand.

[easternpine]

I really needed to re-hear all this "advice" right now. We missed you Tim!