Allston on Writing: Peer Review
Allston discusses peer review as a tool for writers.
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Storytelling
Minding the Blind Spots: Learning From Many Points of View
Creating stories is like driving a bus – awareness of blind spots is critical. Who would you want driving the bus, the person who doesn’t care about the blind spots or the one using every means possible to scan for potential problems?
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Celebration VI: EU Author Allston Lays Down Tracks
In his lecture “Laying Down Tracks,” Allston likens writing a novel to creating a polished musical recording in a studio. One at a time, a track of each different instrument and voice is captured and saved, then layered one on top of the other and meshed into harmonic excellence. He suggests that this process is transferable to writing a novel, and may in fact help you to write more efficiently or with greater speed.
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Olympics, Storytelling, and All Things Being Equal
Ultimately telling Olympic stories is no different than any other type of storytelling. Great stories exist in the hearts of the people that create them; they can’t be manufactured.
Read moreBringing Your A-Game to Geekdom
Early next month I will be speaking at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library in northern California about the wide range of opportunities open to science fiction fans.
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How Raising the Bar for Women in Storytelling is Good for Everyone
How does this relate to the message of my blog? Sometimes people hear the message “we need more and better portrayals of female characters” and misunderstand it to mean that the women expressing it want the portrayals of male characters to be brought down a notch. This is an unfounded fear, though. Just like I’ve seen in my cross-training as an artist and an engineer, better portrayals of female characters will only make their male counterparts, and the stories they are in, that much better. Here are a couple of examples I noticed this week in the television industry.
Read moreREVIEW: Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors
As I prepared my review of Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology by Jennifer K. Stuller, I found myself jotting down some comments about fandom, feminism, and storytelling that I wanted to share in the introductory blog post. Some turned into more – then a lot, and I reconsidered how to present all the ideas the book had inspired for me. So I’m keeping today’s post short; I don’t want a voluminous blog with my own commentary to overshadow how important Stuller’s book is.
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