Things I Learned This Summer

Well, I've moved into my room at school, almost all my textbooks are in, and classes start on Monday. This means only ONE THING: that it's time for Wild Card's List Of Things She Learned This Summer!

It is Acceptable to Have Fun at Your Older Brother's Wedding

It's supposed to be a good day. And if it is, HOORAY!

Try to Get a Summer Job

Even if it's working retail, you'll get some money and learn how to handle a lot of personalities and some kinds of stress that you may not be used to. If it's something you enjoy, like dressing up and telling stories, then even better!

Find Your Happy Place

I think this factors into a lifetime of work - if you can tolerate it most days, then HOORAY. If it's in a place you like, HOORAY!

If You're In a Position of Power...

During Gather at the River in early August, a particular bishop showed up. He has, apparently, a past filled with actions raging from "problematic if you look too hard" to "affecting at least one person's ordination process." He was not a welcome figure at Gather. But he came. And it was tense. But he said that he needed to hear what had been said.
I don't know much of his history with the LGBTQIA+ community, aside from his problems with it, but showing up at Gather at all had to take a lot of guts. If he was so moved, it can't have been for nothing.

Find A Good Series To Invest Your Fangirling Into

You don't have to watch or read EVERYTHING that gets recommended to you. You CAN, however, find a few things to geek out over if you want to. It's perfectly acceptable to find one or two REALLY GOOD THINGS.
It's also okay to move on from those things.
It's okay if those things are not the mainstream fun things. Just make sure you can summarize them for people who ask.

All-Nighters Suck

I think there's a reason that I don't study past 1:00 AM, as a rule. That reason is that all-nighters are AWFUL. They throw off your sleep schedule, and being tired and in class is not a good combination.






So these were just some of the things I learned this summer. If you learned anything cool, leave it in the comments!

On Openings

I just returned from Barnes and Noble, and I have discovered my new favorite opening line, from a Steampunk novel called The Friday Society, by Adrienne Kress:
"And then there was an explosion."
First off, this is a great use of in media res. Explosions don't happen on a daily basis in many places, so you start with a question of what the hell is going on.
Then it continues:
"It was loud. It was bright. It was very explosion-y."
That bit sets the tone for the rest of the story (or at least, for the page and a half that I have read) - for what I have read so far of The Friday Society, the 3rd person narrator is rather sarcastic and witty, and keeps up a similar narration to what has just been displayed, even if it only involves the development of the focus character, who caused the explosion (it wasn't on purpose, but... she's a lab assistant in a Steampunk universe; explosions are bound to happen).

A good opening, my friends, is more important than a good closing.  Why?  If you don't have a good opening, your readers are never going to make it to the end, so you will never know whether the readers will celebrate a good end to a good book, or complain of a terrible end to a decent book.  They're not even going to make it to the middle bits, even if the middle bits are of a higher caliber than the ending or the beginning.  Though it is important to develop every part of your writing, and to edit (which, unfortunately, I have displayed a severe lack in the writing of this blog), open your book well.

On Reading

One of the things I'm going to miss during the finals week cramming - and that I have missed during the semester and during NaNoWriMo - is reading.  If there's one thing that almost all writers can agree on (all novel writers, anyway), is that reading books is important for style development and just plain fun.  It doesn't matter what genre, really - I guess if you want to write erotica, you should probably read a fair dose of erotica before and during your erotica writing experience.  Similar goes for romance, fantasy, sci-fi, and anything else you might want to write, and it's especially important if you want to do a crossover - if you want to do a sci-fi romance novel, that's your choice, but you'd need experience reading both.

There are reasons for this - reading when you're writing.

First off, you can't just put "how to write a romance novel" into Google. Well, you can, but there's a difference between reading the wiki how-to on it and actually seeing it in action.  Besides, the tips in the wiki page are very generic - "create two characters," "end your novel well."  Read to know what those mean: every writer is different, so there will be some variation in how each character is presented, what the plot is, what causes the emotional tension, and such like.

Secondly, read to know what not to do.  Every writer has their good bits and their bad bits.  The trick is to finding which is which - especially in your opinion.  You're the writer; write what you like.  Grammar rules, however, cannot be bent under any circumstances that are excusable if you have an editor.

Read what you know, and what you don't know.  Expand your horizons a bit, and you'll be able to write more and better.  I'd say "write what you know," but that's a piece of advice I have mixed feelings about.  I'm a fantasy writer.  I've never met a dragon.  I don't know any dragons.  But I've written several dragons.  In each of my three mostly-complete novels, and in two that are in progress, there have been reference to a dragon at some point or another.  In four of the five aforementioned works, the dragon is a significant being.  In the fifth, its existence is situational and any other creature could have thrown the characters together adequately.
Anyway, the point is, I've never met a dragon.  I've never met a dwarf.  I've never met an elf.  I don't know any of these beings personally, but I write about them all the time.

That's not the point.

The point is, READ!