Request for Blogical Inspiration

Posted on by scott

I’m headed off to Comic Con in San Diego (schedule below), and will be seeing some (all too few!) of you there. So here’s me sitting down between packing and enplaning, thinking I should get in one more blog post, because it’s been a while, and yet . . .

I can’t think of what to say. Seriously, there’ve been a bunch of cool news items about toxoplasma, some awards news, etc., but I have not felt motivated to blog them. Maybe it’s being in the middle of the hottest summer in recorded history, or maybe it’s being in the middle of writing Goliath. But whatever it is, I’m weirdly bereft of ideas.

So let’s use this comments space as a teachable moment, or a motivatable moment, perhaps. In other words, tell me what you want me to blog! Seriously, what kind of the posts on this blog do you most enjoy, re-read, link to, or at least chortle at? Parasites? Travel pics? Fan art? Writing advice? Bungee jumping? I aim to please.

All right, here’s what I’m doing at Comic Con:

Thursday, July 22. 4:00-5:00
Room 25ABC
Twisting Genres— Fantastic fiction authors talk about pushing the envelope on genre, not confining it to one definition. Participants include China Miéville (Kraken), Justin Cronin (The Passage), Naomi Novik (Tongues of Serpents), Daryl Gregory (The Devil’s Alphabet), Jeffrey J. Mariotte (Cold Black Hearts), Robert Masello (Blood And Ice), Keith Thompson (The Leviathan trilogy), and Scott Westerfeld (The Leviathan trilogy). Moderated by Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy.

And by popular demand: There will be a signing with all of us afterwards, sponsored by the wonderful Mysterious Galaxy (a bookstore, not an actual galaxy). This is first time that Keith and I have signed together in the United States, and unlike boring me with my scrawly-ass signature, he can draw stuff for you.

Okay, I have a plane to catch. Ciao for now.

73 thoughts on “Request for Blogical Inspiration”

  1. I’d love you to post some writing advice. I recently re-read yours and Justine’s NaNoWriMo advice from last year, and it’s helping me a great deal with writing my novel.
    Especially the meta-documents and different uses of Scrivener, I never thought of it myself, and always wondered why my writing was such a mess when I got past the first 30 pages.

    Or maybe a post about inspiration? Where do you get ideas? What makes your fictional brain kick in a higher gear and spit out new and original ideas?

    Also, things that make your characters come alive. Like Liset said: background stories, names, personal traits. Do they just pop into your head or do you have a method to come up with that?

    Have a nice trip! 🙂

  3. i love writing advice. big thing for me these days: finding the TIME and the MOTIVATION to sit down and write. i’ve got 2 young kids (15 months and 3 years old), so by the time they’re in bed, all i wanna do it veg out for a bit, then pass out. and forget writing while they’re awake, that just doesn’t work. at all. anyways, i’m 51k words into my book (that will likely end up being around 75k in the end), and i just can’t seem to make myself sit down and DO IT! i’m at the good part, the exciting part, and all i can think about is all the stuff i need to fix, rewrite, add to, take away from, and in general edit the crap out of. but when i think about actually DOING that stuff, i feel overwhelmed and decide to just go to bed. how do you get past that and make it happen?

  4. Writing advice!!!!!!!!!!
    I just started reading your blog like a couple months ago so I haven’t seen any of your writing advice. I totally heart your books so any writing advice from you would be Golden! One day I hope to have at least one book out there for the world to read.

  8. Fan art is always good. Oooh, I spotted writing advice, that would be awesome. And I’d love to hear all about ComicCon.

  11. It would be AMAZING if you could give us some book recommendations! I’ve haven’t read any really good books in a while, and I need help!

  12. Beth-la,
    Have you read His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman? Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card? The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien?

  13. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings, but I’ve never even heard of the other two. I’ll check them out. Thanks!

  14. Sure! His Dark Materials is actually a trilogy. It starts with The Golden Compass. I’ve been hard-pressed to find anything to match it since I was about ten years old…

    For some reason I’ve been thinking about The Glass Wright’s Apprentice lately… I read it a long time ago and I don’t remember how well written it was, but you never know… I was actually even considering re-reading it myself.

    Some of my favorite school books that I think are good reads are: The Giver; Fahrenheit 451; 1984 (kind of graphic); Alas, Babylon; To Kill a Mockingbird; and The Secret Life of Bees

  15. Oh! If you really like hard core sci-fi you should try The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (hilarious) and the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov (quite serious / intellectually mature)
    The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is also pretty good, but you probably won’t enjoy it if you’re under 15 or so…

  17. You’re the best author I’ve ever read! So I thoroughly enjoy writing advice! I also like when you tell us some “behind the scenes” stuff from your books. Such as why you picked a certain name for a character or where you got some of your ideas from.

  18. I am thirteen years old and just recently finished “Leviathan”, I personally loved the book and how it took bits and pieces of World War I and mixed them around with walking machines used by Clankers, and half beast – half machine creations used by the Darwinists. At first I was only reading about two chapters per day at school, then started really enjoying the book, and read about 18 chapters per day (which didn’t take long to finish). It is my #1 favorite book as of now, and I cannot wait for “Behemoth” to be released, I am going to order it immediately after it releases.
    -Nathan Duncan

  19. I remembered one more thing I would liek to see: A…. (what do you call it?) Well, I don’t know whta it is… but what would happen if the cahracters i all of your books met? I’d like to see soemthing about that. All of their world colliding or maybe the cahracters in Levithan traveling forward in time and seeing the Uglies books as their furture world or even dimensional travel. Something that puts characters from seperate series together. (Is there a blue time in Leviathan? What would happen if there was? Is it possibel for the people in Uglies to travel inter-dimensionally or back in time or something.?) I just want to see characters in the Uglies books, Leviathan(Behemoth too?), and Midnigters meet each other. That would be interesting. It would be very happy-making and really cool. I stil can’t remember what they call that though. It is going to bug me all day.

    And to Nathan: I was reading Leviathan at school at first too, but I had to eventually take it home to finish it because I didn’t get enough time to read it at school. It is pretty amazing. And if you want to order it sooner, I think you can pre-order it at Amazon right now, so maybe you’ll even get the exact day it comes out and you’ll have mor eof a guarantee of it not already being sold out because of how many fans Mr. Westerfeld has.

  20. New suggestion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! With the characters meeting each other stuff, would characters in Midnighters and Uglies be Clanker type people or Darwinist type people? Would they like Walkers or Beasties? Which would Dess like? Which would Tally like? I think since you wrote Bogus To Bubbly there should be a guide type thing for the books about stuff for the other books. Instead of making a blog out of it all you could write another guide type thing.

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