About 65

October2011leaves 

Issue 66 (January-March) will be at least a week

late due to illness

 

Vision

Issue 65

October/November/December 2011

 

Vision is now published quarterly, rather than every two months.  The new schedule is:

  • January/February/March
  • April/May/June
  • July/August/September
  • October/November/December

Welcome to the last issue of the year! We have some great articles for you.  2011 has been a year of change for Vision and the ezine has come out better for it. I am slowly getting the back issues into place and sorting out what will happen in the future.  With only four issues a year, I have found that people are more willing to do regular collumns, so you can expect a few more of those in 2012.  With a clearer idea of what we have, it will be far easier to fill in more material and ask for specific types of work.  Overall, I think Vision will continue to grow and exceed the great steps we've already taken.  I look forward to next year and seeing what more we can do!

 

I am always looking for new articles.  Read the submission guidelines and consider sending me an article or two about writing.  I look forward to hearing from you.

 

 

From the Editor: The Joy of the first draft

NaNo, my favorite writing event of the year, is only a month away. I'm busy getting bits and pieces of my stories together and having a great time preparing. I'll have even more fun when NaNo arrives. I love flying through first drafts -- living the story and moving with it at a speed I can't manage the rest of the year. I have to set a few days aside for NaNo and pretty much ignore everything else for a while. Then, when the world pushes back in, I still give a bit more than normal to writing for the rest of the month.

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Inkygirl Comic 

-- by Debbie Ridpath Ohi

It was a Dark and Stormy Night
 

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Questions for Authors

-- by Lazette Gifford

Welcome to the last set of questions for 2011.Thank you to the authors who have taken the time to answer and let the rest of us see into how you approach work.

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Workshop: Theme

-- by Lazette Gifford

Theme, at its simplest, can be stated as a description of a human situation: love, betrayal, hope, despair, trust, desperation, hatred, discovery, madness, tradition, pride. . . . There are many single words which can be applied as the basic theme to a story. When considering theme, start by choosing one word you might use to underlay and stress some principle in your story. As your story develops, you might change your mind about the single word. However, starting with this underlying element for a story can create a new, cohesive bond to tie your scenes together.

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Mar's Market: Interview: John Joseph Adams

-- by Margaret McGaffey Fisk

Continuing the interviews with editors mentioned in the survey I conducted for the January-February 2011 issue of Vision. . . .

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Indie Corner: Registering ISBN Numbers at Bowker

-- by J A Marlow

With the increasing numbers of authors going it alone without publishers as part of the self-publishing Indie movement, this means authors are also having to take on the responsibilities once taken care of by their publishers. One of the items an author might want to consider is buying and using their own ISBN numbers.

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Zette's Take: The Problem with Openings

-- by Lazette Gifford

This is the first thing people need to realize when they start a book: Openings can, and should, change if they need to. I have often heard people saying how they can't possibly go on until they have the beginning of the story perfect. And some of them, of course, never go on. Others go on, then find all the work they'd done is useless because something drastic changed in the story. They become disillusioned, seeing all the hard work done for nothing. So some of these people never finish, either..

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Seven Ways to Beat the Block

-- by G R Colorado

Writer's block is defined as a break in writing caused by fear, anxiety, life change, or anything that causes frustration.

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10 Things to do When You're not Writing

-- by April Aragam

The job of a writer is not only the act of writing. A writer has many things to do during the course of a day, week and month. When you are not writing you don’t have feel like you are not working. Here are ten other things you can do:

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Let's Try an Experiment

--by Sumaya Bouadi

At the moment, I'm reading House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. For those of you unfamiliar, House of Leaves is a postmodernist novel regarding a film. However, the plot isn't what caught my eye. The formatting, on the other hand, did. Beginning as a simple novel, House of Leaves quickly becomes a literary labyrinth, with text boxes randomly arranged on the pages, some pages with a single word, while others are packed full of words, some upside down, some mirror reflections. In short, it is a prime example of experimental fiction, a genre which is slowly becoming more and more accepted.

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The Quick And Dirty Guide to Conlanging For Writers, Part 3

-- by Alexis Carter

Previously, in Part 2 of The Quick and Dirty Guide to Conlanging for Writers, I discussed some of the sounds that can be made with a human mouth and provided some guidelines for choosing consonants and vowels for your constructed language. This segment of The Quick and Dirty Guide to Conlanging for Writers addresses how to string those letters together to form words.

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Website Review:The CIA World Factbook

 -- Reviewed by Erin M. Hartshorn

 The World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html) really is a one-stop shopping place for information about the world. It's updated weekly and includes, as it says, "information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities." It's also one of the U.S. government's most accessed publications/

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Book Review: Promote Your Book by Patricia Fry

-- Reviewed by Lazette Gifford

This book is an excellent checklist of possible marketing ideas for your book releases.  While it doesn't go into detail, it does point you in the right direction and lets you create the type of promotion which will work best in your circumstances. 

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New on the Shelves-- Books

Check out the new publications by Forward Motion Members

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New on the Shelves-- Short Works

 

Check out the new publications by Forward Motion Members

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