Sometimes trying to figure out what's going on in social media feels like guesswork at best.One of the things I really find interesting about the class is that social media changes so rapidly that every time I teach it, I have to add new information. For example, last time I taught, no one had heard of Pinterest, so I’m adding a new section about it and how to use it. One of the questions that often comes up in the Blogging class is where I get my news and information about social media. This list provides the ones I’ve found most useful.
All Facebook
Current and breaking information about Facebook.
All Twitter
Current and breaking information about Twitter.
Search Engine Watch
Search Engine Watch provides tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
Other wonderful things in the offering include Tobias Buckell’s novels Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose, three additional stories from the anthology in which Surrogates originally appeared, Clockwork Phoenix 3, and work by Terry Brooks, David Anthony Durham, Nancy Holder, Katherine Kerr, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ellen Kushner, Jay Lake, Naomi Novik, Sherwood Smith, and Tad Williams, as well as much more. It’s very worth checking out if you’d like to load up your e-reader with a virtual armload for free.
I'm enjoying writing in a steampunk world. It allows for a lovely texture, and description drawn in a different way than my usual. I'm also enjoying the protagonists who have emerged, particularly Pinkerton agents Elspeth and her companion, Artemus West.This snippet from the story I’m currently working on is set in the same world as recent pieces “Her Windowed Eyes, Her Chambered Heart” and “So Little Comfort in This World.”
Elspeth folded her hands in her lap, trying to keep her brows from knitting. She hated trains.
They were dirty, with bits of smut and coal blown back from the massive brass and aluminum steam engine pulling them along, and engrimed by successions of previous passengers.
They were noisy, from the engine’s howl to the screech of the never-sufficiently-greased axles as they rocketed along the steel rails with their steady pocketa-pocketa-pocketa chug seeping up through the swaying floor.
And they were oppressively full of people, all thinking things, all pressing down on her Sensitive’s mind, making her shrink down into the hard wooden seat as though the haze of thoughts hung like coal-smoke in the air and if she sank low enough, she’d avoid it.
She glanced over at her fellow Pinkerton agent, who returned her look with his own slightly quizzical if impersonal gaze. All of the curiosity of their fellow passengers was directed at him, perhaps the first mechanical being they’d ever seen, with silver and brass skin and curly hair, eyebrows, and moustache of gilded wire.
“They shouldn’t be keeping us back here,” she said for the third time in as many minutes. “If we’re his assigned bodyguards, they should let us up to inspect his compartment.”
“The porter said he’d tell them we were here,” Artemus said in precisely the same tone he’d used the first two times he’d said these words.
