The blog is new and shiny right now. I intend to post about twice per month, like payday. I don’t want to blow up anyone’s mailbox, but I want to have a few posts to get the conversations going.
They say a good writer has to read as much as he writes. I agree with this, and I’m a failure at it. I’d rather write than read, for now. I manage to get by with articles and comics. This isn’t the same, but it’s better than nothing.
I don’t want to talk about big concepts, just little seeds. If you water them, they will grow. My sources are mainly my RSS reader, and Zite Magazine. Google and others are just too time consuming.
I get all kinds of stuff in my RSS feed. There are food foragers, archaeology posts, comics, and many other things. I also get posts from other writers. Don’t be afraid to subscribe to feeds that interest you. If an article or two aren’t your cup of tea, you have permission to move to the next one.
Zite Magazine is a cool app. It works like Pandora radio in that it learns what you like. You choose topics that interest you, they send articles to your magazine. When you go through your posts, you can give a thumbs up, or down, and the magazine gets smarter.
Many ideas will never go on the page. Few will become stories on their own. These feeds are great for the little things that help you stay true to your genre. Maybe your science fiction needs a gadget. It’s nice to know what cutting edge science is doing. I wrote a couple of steampunk stories years ago, and needed gadgets. It worked great.
Items in the news recently include excavation of supposed vampire graves in Europe, Comet Ison, and giant killer hornets from China. I may never use these, but they bring a lot to the table.
There are people excavating ancient breweries. They scrape the crocks for yeast samples and plant material. Today someone is making beer, mead, whatever, from those ancient “recipes” using the same yeast. If you were writing a paranormal piece, the unintended side effects could make a whole novel. They were culturing the yeast, what did they get by accident…
Writers never really struggle for ideas. We usually have too many ideas. These tools are great for giving a story some extra oomph. I wrote a story once that just needed a special something. I read about new electronic circuits that are so thin they dissolve in water. Real scientists hope to use them in surgical situations someday. In my story, an arsonist used them, and the fire crew washed the evidence away. This one will go up on Amazon eventually.
What sources do you use? I’d love to see some suggestions in the comments.
Entertaining Stories 