Twitter Fiction Festival

How much storytelling can you do in 140 characters? I don’t think I can create fictional tweets but I’d love to see the results at the festival:

http://blog.twitter.com/2012/10/announcing-twitter-fiction-festival.html

Vanessa

Getting to Know the Web

What do you do on Facebook and Twitter? Love it or hate it? Or just can’t be bothered.

One too many

If you are reading this, chances are you own an account on a networking site. There are hundreds of them; they have crept into our daily life. Think about it, fifteen years ago, say round 1997, there was no such thing as a site where you could see what your friends half-way across the world were doing (Ok maybe there was but only the army, hackers and computer geniuses were privy to them). The closest you got was sending a personalized e-mail with a picture that took 5 to 10 minutes to load, if you were lucky enough to have an email that was capable of sustaining the picture containing more than 2 MB’s of data.

Writing prompts

As Sofia suggested, prompts can be a great help in overcoming Mr Writer’s Block. I selected a couple of my favourite sites offering prompts that might help you out when you’re running low on ideas. They are not only helpful when trying to get rid of Mr WB, they’re also great fun when you’re on the train and realise you’re book is still at home.

Creative writing prompts
This site offers over three hundred topics and assignments to choose from. This is my favourite site. Just move your cursor over a number and the assignment or situation appears.

Creativity-portal 365-picture prompts
I try to visit this site daily; unfortunately it hasn’t become part of my daily Internet use yet. This site offers a new picture a day, but if you miss one it isn’t possible to see it unless it returns again next year. It is possible to look up who the artist was and go his or her website to have a look.

Writer’s Digest
This site gives an elaborate choice of prompts with clear assignments. If you have a topic in mind you want to write about the site offers a search engine to make it easier to find a suitable one. The engine does give any result in which the word occurs even when it is part of a different word altogether, like “catch” while I was looking for prompts about a “cat”. Thanks to this I did get some surprising results I wouldn’t have read otherwise.

Writing.com
Until this week I had never visited this site before. The reason why I found it was because I was looking for groups to follow on Twitter – another thing I had never visited until this week– and found several groups offering writing prompts on a  daily basis. This site also has a Facebook page and an app you can download for your Smartphone.

This list is far from complete, so if these sites aren’t what you’re looking for you just search for “writing prompts” or “creative writing prompts” and you’ll find many more websites offering ideas for scenes and short stories.

Good luck!

Cecile

Best of Fantasy / Science Fiction

Today Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) twittered:

If you like making lists or arguing about them, @nprbooks lets you vote here for The Top 100 SF and Fantasy Books http://t.co/SXsHMZs #fun

NPR Books let their “audience” nominate books a month ago and constructed a top-100 list. And now it’s time to narrow it down to a top-10 list. For the next week you can join in and vote for your favourite SF and fantasy novels.

I do have to add that I’m missing some of my own favourite fantasy novels, like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Garth Nix’s The Abhorsen Chronicles and Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle.

I guess it’s just like Neil Gaiman says – there’s always something to argue about. Plenty of people have commented at the bottom of the NPR Books page about books missing from the list or books they feel shouldn’t even be on the list.

One thing’s for sure, it’s a great list if you’re wondering what you should read next. I’m sure there aren’t many people who’ve read them all.

Oh, and don’t forget to vote: http://t.co/SXsHMZs.

Vanessa