7 Interesting Links For Writers

I've been busy with other things these last few days, and have gotten behind on my blog reading.

For months I've wanted to do a kind of 'dogs breakfast' post where I talk briefly about a bunch of articles that have wonderful information for writers. Since I have such an embarrassment of riches at the moment I thought, no time like the present! Here we go:

7 interesting links for writers:

1. Amazon's New Subcategories

Amazon has a few new subcategories--character categories and theme categories--for books. India Drummond over at The Writer's Guide to E-Publishing tells you how to get your books listed in these new categories. To read more about this see her article:  Amazon’s New SciFi, Fantasy, and Romance Subcategories. Thanks to Passive Guy for the link.

2. Chuck Wendig's Flash Fiction Challenge: Psychic Powers

This week the theme is psychic powers: write a story of around 1,000 words where a character has one of the 20 psychic powers listed in this blog post: Flash Fiction Challenge: Must Contain Psychic Powers. I've found writing flash fiction has helped me enormously, it's a fabulous way to stretch one's writing muscles.

3. What It Means To Be A Writer

Amanda Palmer gave a talk entitled, Connecting The Dots. Good stuff. Again, thanks to Passive Guy for the link.

4. Dean Wesley Smith Does An Encore

I loved it when Dean Wesley Smith blogged about writing a 70,000 word novel in 10 days. Well, he's doing it again! This time Dean won't be writing a novel, instead he'll write 5 shorts stories and he's starting June 10th. Read more here: “Ghost Novel” Writing So You Can See.

5. Storytelling Techniques

My goal is to write stories other folks love to read. How one does that, time after time, is the 64,000 dollar question. Fortunately, this is the sort of craft question the folks over at The Write Practice love to write about.

Joe Bunting asks: Does your story promise to reveal a secret? A solution to a problem? Is it about the demise of a savior figure? Those aren't the only ways of adding interest to a story, but they are great ideas to have in your writer's toolkit.

6. Hugh Howey: Does Barnes & Noble Manipulate Its Rankings?

It looks like erotic stories aren't allowed to rank above 126 over at Barnes & Noble, no matter how well they sell. Read more here.

7. Short Is The New Long

Recently I've talked a bit about whether novellas or novels sell better. Here's an article encouraging writers to spend more time writing short stories: Short is the New Long: 10 Reasons Why Short Stories are Hot.

Have you come across a great article about writing? Tell us about it! 

Photo credit: "Oerlikon" by Thomas Leuthard under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.