Hello, World
Welcome, and thanks for being here! This is a burst of firsts: first blog post, first website, first time seriously trying to launch my own business. My goal with this blog is to collect useful resources for writers and talk about what I'm writing and my experience of the writing process.
Around the web for writers
Research & public domain photos
I’ve been looking up public domain images this week, and JSTOR and Wikimedia Commons are treasure troves of photos, prints, and art like the photo below. Public domain images are great for blog posts, illustrated quotes, and collage/art projects, even if you aren't using them for research or a non-fiction writing project. JSTOR and Wikimedia Commons also have helpful citation information available.
When I was doing history, JSTOR was a big part of my life. When I moved on from working as a professor, I largely left it behind. I only began to miss the access I had through my university recently when I decided that I wanted to read academic writing on fantasy and mystery as genres over time.
Reading about genre history is one of the threads that led me back to JSTOR. The other is my recently discovered hobby of making photoshop collages using public domain images. I've been using line drawings collected in volumes published specifically to be used in collage and papercrafts, so it didn't even cross my mind to see what else was out there until I started thinking about art for this website and how book covers are created.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877) (artist). Winter Trees Reflected in a Pond. 1841–42. The Cleveland Museum of Art; Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Collection: PH - British 19th Century; Department: Photography; Provenance: description: William Henry Fox Talbot [1800-1877] (the artist), Chippenham, United Kingdom; Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund. https://jstor.org/stable/community.24624786.
Book covers
Last week, I came across an interview with Zoe Norvell, the creator of I Need a Book Cover. The website is great: it has an appealing and unusual interface that's still very user-friendly and the book covers are fantastic. I'm not planning for my own book cover yet, but now I know where my first stop will be.
Thinking about book covers drove me to grab my copy of Meddling Kids, which is a fun read and a cool take on Scooby Doo meets Cthulhu, but what got me interested in the book was the cover. Looking at the cover credits it dawned on me: for many book covers, each element has been licensed individually and composed together by the cover designer. I’d thought that cover designers were drawing the cover art (some are). I just assumed that was how it worked, and I never questioned the assumption. None of this should imply that it takes anything less than significant skill and experience to design a good cover, of course, but it was a big discovery for me.
Writing & projects
Illustrated quotes
I'm always ready to swoon over a great sentence, so I thought that sharing some of the striking sentences I come across in my reading would be a fun way to connect with people. At least, it's the kind of thing I'd like to find in my social media.
With public domain photos on my mind, I thought I'd try using an image related to the work as the background for the sentence. It seemed like an obvious way to make it more visually interesting, and finding public domain images to use made it fun research.
I have a habit of starting more projects that I can reasonably keep moving forward at a quick rate, so I've only done one illustrated quote so far. It didn't make any waves, but I enjoyed it, so I'm planning to keep at it.
Outlining
I’d heard writers talk about how chaotic the writing process can be, but having never made a serious attempt to write fiction before now, I didn't realize that they were just being factual and realistic.
So far, I’ve done a mix of outlining and discovery writing. I haven’t found an outlining method that feels easy to use, but I think that having a plan of where I’m going will help avoid some of the wasted effort. Maybe not a lot of the wasted effort, for me at least, because I’ve written a load of pages and many of them won't make it in. That’s okay, though, because part of the point of a first novel is to figure out how to write a novel. Also, it has always been a challenge for me to find the most effective way to organize my writing for ease of reading.
When I listen to authors being interviewed about their writing process, I always hope that they’ll go into more detail than they usually do about how they outline. What outlining approach do you take? I’d love to hear about it!