The Inevitable Award Post

An Instructive Listing of the Fashions of Tabat, being Pamphlet #2 of the first series of “A Visitor’s Guide to Tabat,” Spinner Press, author unknown.

Tabat, like any city, has fashions that distinguish it, often shaped by the city’s history and resources. To look like one of the natives, you may want to purchase one or more of the following to wear.

Feather cockades, worn pinned to the breast or on a hat, represent a long tradition in the city. The explorers of the early expedition Perseverance found a river of feathers, cast off by vast flocks of waterfowl. They brought back sackfuls of the varicolored feathers to the city and it became customary to show one’s support for one expedition or another by wearing the cockades. In recent times they have become associated with different political powers in the city and with the coming of the elections, they are widely used to indicate one’s party affiliation.

Rain market hats, wide-brimmed and tightly woven of purple reeds, are seen in abundance on the streets of Tabat and are as functional and cheap as they are picturesque. Some sellers sell hats with designs or slogans painted upon them, often distributing the latter at political rallies.

Great-coats, woven of wool or made of dyed fur, are traditional gear for Merchants, Explorers, and others who travel widely. Their styles may vary from year to year in matters like buttons, pocket cut, or thickness of piping, but generally they remain the same in overall look.

Dandies of either sex prize the fine lace gloves produced by the Altos factory, where they are woven by the large spiders exclusive to Altos use by order of the Duke. If on the street outside where they are housed in early morning or evening, linger to hear their haunting song.

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Love the world of Tabat and want to spend longer in it? Check out Hearts of Tabat, the latest Tabat novel! Or get sneak peeks, behind the scenes looks, snippets of work in progres, and more via Cat’s Patreon.

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#sfwapro

Let me repeat that. Hooey.

You do not need to have a blog. You do need to have a website that lists your publications and provides a way to contact you, so people can track you down if they want to. That’s it. The world is full of blogs with writing advice from people with only a few publications under their belt. Sometimes they give good advice, sometimes they don’t. It’s not ordained that you must contribute your quota of “avoid adverbs!” to the pool.

What else do you really need? You need to be writing steadily and sending stuff out.

Yes, if you have 50K Twitter followers, you may be more desirable in an editor’s eyes. But the time and effort you would need to spend growing that Twitter following from scratch would be better spent writing. You are not going to gain swarms of followers unless you are putting some effort into entertaining and informing them.

If blogging is going to be a chore for you, then don’t do it. Or engage in a very simple form of blogging: post a brief excerpt of what you wrote that day (or week, or whatever). You’ll find people are just as satisfied with an interesting story chunk as that preachy bit about not piling adjectives together. And, when the piece is published, that announcement gives you something else to put on the blog.

John Scalzi gets mentioned as a blogging success story. What doesn’t get mentioned is that he put an entire book up a bit at a time, and gained much of his following that way. Scalzi does have the sort of web presence that would make a publisher lick their chops. That sort of web presence doesn’t come easily.