Home of the Snarkmaiden

Another for-my-reference writerstuff post.

Jo Walton explains her rather handy-and-powerful-seeming name-system generating algorithm here.

Also, a census-data-powered contemporary American name generator (with adjustable name-obscurity) can be found here.

This post paid for and approved by your local Gratuitous Hyphen Propagation Council.

In case you don't already read the blog, I wanted to note that Teresa over at Making Light points to an excellent essay [NB: pdf format] of advice on writing -- it's aimed specifically at critiquing novels in progress, but it has lots of sound advice which applies to writing at any length. Mary Kay and Mris will presumably hate this piece of advice: "If you're not naturally a visual thinker, learn to be one." But for me as a reader, this is dead on. On the other hand, "Some new writers love to withhold information so they can give the reader a surprise later. This [...] might [...] mean you’re relying too much on the idea of surprising the reader later instead of entertaining the reader now," hits close enough to the bone to be an owie.

Also hitting home for me at the moment: "Good writing does more than one thing at a time," -- the insight here being that if you have a scene or paragraph that does only X (scene setting, character, plotting, whatever) and the feedback you get is that it has "too much" X, it may be that it isn't really too much X, but rather that there's not enough of anything else.

A number of the observations by various vetted pros in the comments section are good stuff on process,too. Though you may want to skip over the back and forth about Why People Hate .pdf Format. (I did.) I was particularly interested when Elizabeth Bear weighed in on revising process, possibly because I suspect my process mirrors hers, and I love to be validated by writers I admire.

Edit: The HTML version of the piece is now available here. [Scroll down past the giant, irksome YouTube screen]