m. c. de marco

My alma mater, the Odyssey Writing Workshop, will soon be offering writing classes online. See SFScope or the Odyssey website for more details.

The latest Writing Question on the Odyssey Writing Workshop livejournal was about Creating a Plot. See how Odyssey graduates answer the eternal question of outlining vs. inspiration.

Via Language Log and also Universal Hub: a grammar vigilante from Somerville and his accomplice were fined and banned from the national park system after editing a historic sign. The Arizona Republic reported last week that

Jeff Michael Deck, 28, of Somerville, Mass., and Benjamin Douglas Herson, 28, of Virginia Beach, Va., pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Flagstaff after damaging a rare, hand-painted sign in Grand Canyon National Park.

Via a mailing list: BoingBoing reposts a brief excerpt from The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos, my teacher from Odyssey.

Thus it seems the lasers we have today would be capable of doing many of the things we see in Star Wars. We could injure or kill people; we could burn structures or melt holes in walls; we could destroy targeted areas of spaceships, assuming we could keep a beam on them for long enough. The main difference between Star Wars lasers and ours is the size.

The application deadline for Odyssey 2007 is approaching:

Odyssey is an intensive six-week workshop for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror held each summer at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. Developing writers aged 17-65 apply from all over the world. Sixteen are admitted, and over 50% of graduates go on to be published.

I was trying to remember who Greg Donegan really was, and Wikipedia led me to his real self’s co-website with co-author Jennifer Crusie: CruiseMayer.com. Besides a fun overview of their collaboration, the site has a 2007 Online Writing Workshop. This month they’re covering point of view. See the syllabus for future topics.

Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Manuscript Revision: From First Draft to Last in One Cycle is aimed at those who revise too much:

And let’s debunk one bit of writer myth while we’re here: Doing a seventeenth revision on a project does not make a writer an artist or move him above the writer hoi polloi any more than dressing entirely in black or wearing tweed jackets with leather elbow patches or big, black drover coats.

I’d rather write a whole new novel than revise an old one, so I also found it inspiring. Now all I need is that dr