Truth is Stranger Than Fiction and other Writing Links (#SFWApro)

Shannon Thompson discusses the idea that truth can be stranger than fiction because truth isn’t obligated to be plausible. I’ve blogged about that before, and I was thinking about it again while watching The World Is Not Enough yesterday (I’ll be reviewing the movie in detail soon). Denise Richards is wildly unconvincing as a nuclear expert, but in real life there probably are nuclear experts who don’t look or sound like nuclear experts. But of course they have reality to back it up, so they can get away with it.
•Crunching the numbers: This article looks at what really in-depth data analysis can do for a news story.
•If you’re writing historical SF/fantasy, knowing what people saw in the world of their future might make for interesting detail.
•Joyce Carol Oates offers writing tips.
•Some advice on the use of dialog tags.
•AOL’s hyperlocal Patch news system didn’t succeed financially. While hyperlocal is often touted as the key to making newspapers/websites people want to buy, it’s obviously not a magic bullet.
•Mystery novelist Sherry Harris suggests that if you’re having trouble with your plot, you have your character sit with you in a bar and tell you about this really wild thing that happened—and let them tell you how it went. I tried that while replotting Brain From Outer Space and it really helps.
•Some thoughts on writing medieval dialogue. Though I love “by the rood!” and similar oaths more than the blogger.
•Even writing as powerfuls as Shakespeare can be confounded by cultural differences. Amusing, but this is really a very old shtick—I’ve read lots of short stories built around someone from a different culture or social class trying to make sense of the classics.
•Most Sherlock Holmes stories are now in the public domain. It’s only a district court ruling, of course, but that’s encouraging—maybe I won’t have to edit Questionable Minds to take them out. Most other works, however ….
•Back last May, Amazon announced a licensing arrangement to pay fan-fic writers in certain universes. John Scalzi concludes it’s a good deal for Amazon and Alloy Publishing (the first licensee) but not so much for the writers..
•Kristine Kathryn Rusch on why writers should think of themselves as licensing copyright, not selling books. The argument that the more rights you retain, the better off you are is hardly new, but she explains it very well.
•Here’s a rare upbeat story about rights: Montgomery Ward owned the rights to Rudolf, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but gave them back to the creator for free.
•Young adult novels go back to at least the 1950s.
•If you submit a story to a crowdfunded anthology before it has money, here are things to think about.
•Salon wonders why we don’t have female anti-heroes comparable to Walter White on Breaking Bad. Part of the problem, as the article points out, is that Walter White can brew up crystal meth and have the audience root for him; his wife gets crap because she smoked a cigarette while pregnant.