If you're interested in finding out how to create effective, engaging characters, check out my "Building Characters" class or the Dialogue mini-class. Click "Take an online class with Cat" to find out more about the class. Lately a couple of stories have arrived in the form of characters. One is Laurel Finch, the little girl in this steampunk snippet, which is tentatively titled “Laurel Finch, Laurel Finch, Where Do You Wander?”. The other is this one, Cathay the Chaos Mage, who is wandering through a city that’s been in my head for a while now, Serendib.
Cathay was a Chaos Mage and didn’t care who knew it. Fear and envy were fine emotions to set someone spinning into a roil, and Cathay could sip from that cup as easily as any other. She dressed sometimes in blue and other times in green or silver or any other color except black. Her sleeves were sewn with opals and moonstones and within their glitter here and there another precious stone, set in no particular order, random as the stars.
A love of gambling was part of Cathay’s definition, and so she often wandered through the doorways of Serendib’s gaming houses, whether they were the high-tech machines of the Southern Quarter or the games of chance and piskie magic played in the alleys across town, in one of the neighborhoods where magic reigned.
Cathay stumbled into Serendib through a one-time doorway, like so many others. She was walking in a wood one moment, and then her foot came down and she was in a city. It made her laugh with delight, the unpredictability of it all, and she soon learned that she had come to the best possible place for a Chaos mage, the city of Serendib, which was made up of odd pockets and uncomfortable niches from other dimensions, a collision of cultures and technologies and economies like no other anywhere.
When she arrived in the city, she had three seeds in her pocket, and so she found an empty lot, precisely between a street where water magic ruled, in constant collision with the road made of fire and iron, so daily fierce sheets of steam arose, driving the delicate indoors and hissing furiously so it sounded as though a swarm of serpents was battling. She dug a hole with her little finger, and then one with her thumb, and a third by staring at the dirt until it moved. Into each she dropped a seed, and covered it up, and sat down to wait.
It was not long till the first inquisitive sprout poked through the dirt, followed by a second. She waited for the third, but it was, by all appearances, uninterested in making an appearance. She shrugged; two were enough for now.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Social Media and Internet Links for November, 2014
Covers the basics of creating and maintaining an online presence for writers. What you need on a website, how to effectively use social media, how to find readers via social media, what free resources are available to writers, whether it's worth it to pay for online advertising, and, most importantly, how to promote yourself online without using all your valuable writing time.Nobody reading your blog? 10 reasons to persist!: Tne more than valid reasons to keep blogging, even when the only person commenting is your mother. 12 Places to Find Fabulous Content: Some good stuff here that’s adaptable to whatever type of blog one might be working with. “Your own bloopers,” for example, is a nice one. How to Use Social Media Listening to Create Better Content for Your Audience: Along the same lines, identify relevant topics to write about on social media as well as identifying influencers and building relationships. How to Get Interviewed by Popular Blogs (Even If You’re Not a Big Shot): If you’re trying to build your authority — as well as links to your website — getting interviewed is a valid strategy. This should help get you started, but be aware it requires a little bit of brazeness. Content Distribution Tools: A variety of additional ways to share content, such as a list on List.ly 13 Experts on How To Promote Content Before Hitting Publish: Some of these steps seem more actionable than others, but some useful stuff to think about when strategizing content production. 7 Practical Ways to Find Content Your Followers Will Love: Primarily about tools rather than different approaches. Covered are Buffer, BuzzSumo, ContentGems, Feedly, HootSuite, Klout, and Swayy.
Community Building a Sustainable Community. As a sometimes moderator of the SFWA boards, and the person the moderators currently report to, I keep an eye out for interesting or useful community building pieces. This is one,although it’s aimed at a community of fans.
Privacy and Security
No one knows where it came from, but there’s new spyware called Regin out there, and it is widespread in crucial industries such as energy, telecom, hospitality, and travel. It’s there and actively monitoring, but experts don’t know why. “Once they [Regin’s operators] gain access, they can remotely control a person’s keyboard, monitor Internet activity, and recover deleted files….O’Murchu said Regin is part of a disquieting trend of government-written and government-enacted malware.”
Social Media What Is Pinterest? A Database of Intentions: An interview with Evan Sharp, one of Pinterest’s co-founders, about the image-centered social network. “What’s cool is that because every object was put there by a person. It’s not the largest inventory in the way that maybe a nerd like me would get excited about. But everything that’s on there, at least one human found interesting, so there is a very good chance that at least one other human is going to find that interesting. So, it’s a good set of objects. It’s the world’s largest set of objects that people care about.”
I put a couple of Twitter-related blog posts out in November. They were Twitter Basics and Best Practices and The One Twitter List You Should Be Keeping: My thoughts on some Twitter best practices.
2014 Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet: “Understanding why you should use images is the easy part. It’s the mastering of how to actually do it that can be tricky. In addition to finding the right images to post, tweet, pin, and share across your different networks; you also need to figure out the right dimensions for your images, as well.” That’s pretty dead on, which makes this a very useful resource. The 10 Latest and Greatest Social Media Strategies to Boost Your Results and Save You Time: Some useful and interesting stuff here, at least a couple of which I plan to try. Social Sharing Powerhouses: Some places (or strategies) you may not be trying, like Guy Kawasaki’s approach of tweeting a piece of content four times over the course of eight hours. 10 Data-Driven Steps To Dominate LinkedIn Publishing: I still don’t feel like I’ve got a good handle on how to use LinkedIn, but this article may provide a decent starting point. Whats the Best Way to Spend 30 Minutes of Your Time on Social Media Marketing? Unsurprisingly, being able to schedule content plays a part here too. Includes the 12 tasks of a social media manager. 8 Piece-of-Cake Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers: Pinterest remains a social network of interest to me. These are some decent best practices for posting on there.
I follow links like this in order to keep my next edition of Creating an Online Presence up to date. If you want to track my links as they occur, you can follow me on Delicious. If you’re interested in the next online class on it, it’s Sunday morning, February 15th, 2015, 9:30 AM-12:30 PM PST. The cost is $89 for former students; $99 for new students.
This story’s still deciding whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. I suspect a little of both.
When he realized how upset his wife was, George wondered if he might have miscalculated. Normally a quiet and loving partner, she was unpacking the dishwasher with a great deal of clattering and muttering.
“It’s not as though you even ever dated her!” she said, slamming a series of mugs into the cupboard.
“I don’t see what the problem is,” he replied, watching as she swept up the basket of cutlery and began throwing it into a drawer to jangle against his nerves. “I’ve left you everything. All I did was will her a copy!”
She turned, resting her hands on her hips. “You’re leaving her a copy of your personality. Essentially yourself.”
“No,” he said. “I’m leaving that to you. You’ll have me on tape, you’ll be able to transfer me into some mechanical form to keep you company. I just thought Janice might like one too.”
“Why?” Mary’s glare said she had her own suspicions.
George refused to dignify them with a reply. He’d been faithful to her all his life. A good husband. He could be allowed his own eccentricities, and If leaving a copy of himself, a digital copy created from a barrage of tests and brain scans and gathered data, to an old friend was one of those eccentricities, then he didn’t really see where Mary had the right to say much about it. She could leave her own copy or copies to her own friends.
