Saving for a Rainy Day in Eden

Emily Wenstrom discusses Ray Bradbury’s process for cranking out a new short story every week. Don’t expect to write novellas this way, but for flash to ~2,000 word pieces, it might work for you. Read about it here. 

A handy list of primary character flaws and the secondary flaws they compensate for.

David Farland is an accomplished author and the gatekeeper of the Writers of the Future contest: all entries go through him first. He posts a regular series of Writing Tips on his blog. Farland's tips are mostly geared toward newer writers, but there's good stuff there for everyone--and if you're planning to enter the contest, knowing the kinds of things the judge loves and hates can't hurt. Check out his writing tips here.

You can also follow the blog on Twitter at @RDE_Blog

Dragon Naturally Speaking is speech recognition software that's exponentially superior to the voice-to-text option that comes with Windows (found under "Ease of Access" in settings). The more you use it, the more it acclimates to your voice and accent. I like to use it to "write" on long drives.  

Scrivener is a word processing platform designed specifically for writers. Instead of having a directory littered with dozens of drafts, research notes, ideas, and storyboards, Scrivener lets you work through the entire creative process in one neatly organized place. This is my go-to software for revising.

The Critique Circle is another workshopping community, but unlike LitReactor, no payment is required to access the workshopping portions of the site. Like LitReactor, submitting a story to the workshop costs points that are earned by giving feedback on other stories. Also like LitReactor, the quality of the feedback can be pretty variable, but the site gets a lot of traffic and the forums are always active.

LitReactor offers a free public forum, topical articles, and quite a few craft essays--some of which are exceptionally good. For paying members, the site also offers a workshopping community where offering helpful critiques of other's writing allows you to earn the points needed to submit one of your own stories. The quality of the workshop feedback can be pretty hit or miss, but I met some of my most trusted readers here.

Brandon Sanderson teaches a college course on writing speculative fiction novels (including a class dedicated to the business end of the equation). Even if you're not a fan of his writing, Sanderson is an excellent teacher; I can't recommend his lectures highly enough.