I think I forgot to mention that my online guide to SF and fantasy writing, oddly enough called Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, is now available online for anyone to peruse and use. It’s not what you’d called finished, exactly. It’s proving to be a much bigger job than I realized to fix all the funky formatting from the earlier html, and get all the navigation links in place. But the first handful of lessons are in good shape, and you can get around the whole course using the contents page.
The guide covers the fundamentals of story writing, including getting from idea to story, world building, creating human and alien characters, plot and conflict, language and style, finishing what you start, workshopping, submitting to publishers, and more. It’s geared to the younger aspiring writer, but I hope could be useful for anyone looking for a little jump start.
It grew out of a course I created for MathSoft’s StudyWorks Science some years ago, and now I’m putting it up for free as a public service. And SFF.Net is hosting it as a public service, as well.
If you know of any young aspiring writers, send ’em over. And please spread the word.
It’s at writesf.com.
llama
Hi,
I actually came across your online guide over google a few days ago.
It was very interesting and I have to say it helped put a structure to the whole writting process, something I was unsure of before. I only had one problem with the site and that was navigation around was a bit tricky, mostly because the later pages weren’t all linked up at the time.
It now saved in my favourites for easy reference 🙂
It’s a good idea and is relatively simple to follow. It’s also a nice way of advertising your book…I’ll be looking out for it in the future.
Good luck getitng it all up and running.
Linda
Jeffrey A. Carver
Thanks, Linda — I’m glad you found it useful. I’m making progress on getting all the links put in. (I uploaded updates to two more lessons today–that’s about 15 separate pages; just a handful of lessons yet to go.) Then I need to go back and fix the weird formatting in places, which is an even pickier and more time-consuming process.)
–Jeff
Tim
because the site is free, i would suggest putting some google adwords on the site and maybe even a donate button through paypal.
Jeffrey A. Carver
I briefly considered that, Tim, then decided I’d like it just to be a free public service, at least for now. (Well, okay, I hope people become interested enough to buy some of my books. But that’s not the main point.)
In any case, sff.net is providing the web hosting as a public service. And truth be told, in the 6 or 8 months since I put google ads on this blog and on my regular web site, I’ve racked up–well, almost exactly what it cost me to register the writesf.com domain for four years. Or to put it another way…not very much.
Maybe someday, if I decide to really expand it with a lot of new features, I’ll change my mind. But that’s not on the immediate horizon.
dossier
I surfed into the course via scifi.com/scifiwire2005, and since I was looking for a way to avoid actual work, I spent the day reading it from ‘front’ to ‘back’, and found it thoroughly engaging. I already employ many of the techniques you’ve suggested, but despite the intended audience, I was able to take away bits of wisdom, and a fresh charge for a story I’ve been working on for far too long.
That alone was worth the time, plus I successfully avoided performing any work, so I wanted to stop in and say thank you. I appreciate your time and effort that the project entailed.
Jeffrey A. Carver
That’s great! Thanks for letting me know.