Tag: nonfiction

Reading tag!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading4 Comments

Found this through Winter and thought it would make a good Sunday morning post.  If you want in, consider yourself tagged.  🙂

Question #1: Do you have a certain place at home for reading?

I am, at this late point in my life, practically biologically programmed to have to read before bed.  This actually was a big sticking point between my wife and I when we moved in together because we needed to find a way that I had enough light to read and she had enough dark to sleep.  At any rate, this means that “prone” is my general reading position, although I do have a couple of comfy chairs in the house and the couch that I use as well.  But I read in bed every single day.

Question #2: Bookmark or a random piece of paper?

Bookmarks.  There are a few dozen in my end table next to my bed and another couple of piles of them strategically arranged on my bookshelves.

Question #3: Can you stop reading anytime you want or do you have to stop at a certain page, chapter, part, etc.?

Generally I need some sort of break in the text to give me a visual indication of where to start the next time I pick the book up.  You’ll notice I do this a lot in my books:

*     *     *

Or a lot of writers will indicate a break by occasionally putting in a double-space between paragraphs.  I prefer the asterisks, and I use them in my books because that’s how I read.

Question #4: Do you eat or drink while reading?

Eat, no, but I’ll frequently have a beverage next to me if I’m reading during the day.

Question #6: One book at a time, or several at once?

Generally just one.  There have been times where I’ve taken a break from a dense nonfiction book to read a novel, but I almost never read more than one novel at a time.

Question #7: Reading at home or everywhere?

At home, but I don’t really lead a lifestyle that would lend itself to reading outside my house anyway.  If I have a few spare minutes I’ll generally check Facebook or Twitter over an ebook.  I have a Kindle but it doesn’t get as much use as it should.

Question #8: Reading out loud or silently in your head?

Silently.

Question #9: Do you read ahead or skip pages?

Rarely, in nonfiction books where I’m very familiar with the subject matter, I’ll skip over what seems to be introductory stuff.  I never skip ahead in fiction; if I’m that bored with a book I just stop reading it.

Question #10: Breaking the spine or keeping it new?

I have actually bought new copies of books that I broke the spine of.  I am fanatical about keeping my books in good shape– most of my library looks like it went from the bookstore straight to the shelf and was never touched again– and I almost never loan my books out because most people don’t get how nutty I am about it.

Question #11: Do you write in books?

Absolutely the hell not.  See #10.  🙂  The one exception is my Biblical Hebrew textbook from college and grad school, which is covered in notes.   I also have a Bible that I’ve annotated fairly extensively.  That’s about it.

Infinitefreetime in The Writing Process Blog Tour

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing12 Comments

photoI have been nominated for a fair number of WordPress blog awards in the past year, and I’ve ignored almost all of them.  That’s not because I’m not grateful, because I am; it’s always awesome when people think of my blog in any remotely positive context, much less in a context involving a prize, but because I end up having to write the same post, more or less, over and over.  I need to start working on recognizing other blogs more often, and the awards help with that, but it’s not at the top of the priority list just yet.  (He said, smarmily.)

Anyway.  It stands to reason, then, that the one time I see a viral blog post happening that I want to post an entry for, no one nominates me.  🙂  So I’m pretending that Taylor Grace or Part Time Monster nominated me, and I’m going to re-tag Winter Bayne and Gene’O over at The Writing Catalog just to be a jerk.

On to the questions:

1. Why do I write what I do?

I write, loosely defined, speculative fiction— mostly of the science fiction and fantasy genres, with a smattering of heavily H.P. Lovecraft-influenced horror mixed in there as well.  Trouble is, for the most part I can’t keep my genres straight.  Those three were what I read most as a kid (and, truth be told, still do) so they’re what I associate “writing” with.  When I’m not writing fiction?  Well… look around.  My nonfictional/blog stuff is mostly about teaching, although I’ll write about anything that strikes me around here and my blog is frequently filled with nonsense.

2. How does my writing process work?

Blogging is first-draft, sit-down-and-go stuff, and once I can get started (which can take a while) if I’m writing nonfiction I write insanely quickly– I once pulled off a thirty-page paper in a few hours in grad school.  Got an A, too.  Fiction requires hours, days or weeks of “thinking” (read: procrastination) and is much, much slower, although one benefit of the advanced thinkytimes is that my first drafts tend to be pretty clean.

If I’m doing blog posts, nothing is required– I can bang out a blog post while watching my son and cooking dinner at the same time.  (And I’ve done that.)  Fiction requires solitude, music, the house to be reasonably clean, nothing else hanging over my head, and music.  I’m thinking of keeping a running soundtrack of my current novel, actually, which so far includes Murs, Mika, and Meg Myers, because apparently iTunes got stuck on M yesterday.

3. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Genre-bending and humor, although I think tonally my work sounds a lot like John Scalzi, if John Scalzi were about a third as good as he is, and that might be overstating my abilities.  But, yeah, the genre-bending.  My series The Benevolence Archives involves ogres and gnomes and dwarves who ride around in spaceships, so I clearly don’t know what the hell I’m doing in keeping genres together.  My first novel, Click, was originally going to be a Conan-type barbarian sword & sorcery thing and somehow ended up with the first major scene being set in an antique shop on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago.  Hopefully this means fans of either genre will like me; the darker parts of my brain think it’s going to ghettoize me out of existence.

I suspect I was bad at coloring in the lines as a kid.

(You can buy The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 at Amazon right here, if you like.)

4. What am I working on at the moment?’

Two projects:  One, a Benevolence Archives novel (the piece linked above is a short story collection and is novella-length) and two, an entry for the Baen Books Fantasy Adventure Award that is– eek– due in just a couple of weeks.  The contest entry is kinda giving me fits, because of the genre-bending tendencies I discussed above:  it’s wanting to bend toward horror more than I think a “fantasy adventure” story ought to, and I either need to rein it in in a direction I don’t think the story wants to go or give up on submitting it and come up with something else.  Which… God, who knows how long that could take.

(Oh, and random advice: if you’re going to take a picture of your workstation for a blog post, make absolutely sure there isn’t a credit card sitting on your desk, face-up, right next to your keyboard!  That is an incredibly bad idea!)