HumpDay Links

For those of you not familiar with HumpDay, that's what our local morning newscast calls Wednesday. As in over the hump and sliding towards the weekend. That said, there's a lovely collection of essays about writing this week so here's your links.

First up are two essays on rules.

Sandra Parshall has a great post over at Poe's Deadly Daughters called "The Tyranny of Rules" http://poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com/2009/06/tyranny-of-rules.html

And Charles Gramlich takes on Fantasy rules over at Razored Zen with his essay "There's Rules, and There's Rules" http://charlesgramlich.blogspot.com/2009/06/theres-rules-and-theres-rules.html

Jim C. Hines is pondering "Series vs Standalones" in Sci-fi, but what interested me was the question he put to his readers asking how series vs the standalone compares with a short story vs a novel. I'll be dropping back during the day to read the responses. http://www.jimchines.com/2009/06/series-vs-standalones/

And the power of words is the topic of the next two essays.

Over at The Kill Zone, Joe Moore discusses picking the right words in "A Boy and a Dog" http://killzoneauthors.blogspot.com/2009/06/boy-and-dog.html

And on the Murderati blog, Louise Ure shows us how much impact just a few words can have on readers in "140 Characters" http://www.murderati.com/blog/2009/6/23/140-characters.html

For you Sci-fi fans Tangent is back. Tanget is a magazine that keeps abreast of all things Sci-fi with reviews, articles and interviews. http://www.tangentonline.com/

THIS JUST IN: Which only goes to show that I should traipse around the net before publishing a post! There's a free e-book full of six short stories for you guys to download. "The Six" is by Stuart Neville and the download is available on his website along with a contest for a print copy of the book. http://www.stuartneville.com/news/latest-news/new-download-a-free-short-story-collection.asp Hat tip to Keith Rawson for the link.

For those of you who don't know, Stuart is one of those lucky guys who picked up an agent and publishing deal for his novel because he was getting his short stories published in zines. Hooray!