Wednesday links: Setting and trunked manuscripts

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few. Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. Spatial surety: moving characters around buildings, from Laurel’s Leaves: Sure, you may know where your story takes place. You may even have a pretty good idea of what that setting looks like. But do you know exactly how your characters need to move to get from one place to the other? Excerpt: “Like a director, you may have put a great deal of thought into how to “block” each individual scene in terms of how characters interact with one another. But do you know how they are interacting with their environment? Further, do you know how your various locations connect?”
2. Trunked manuscripts… after you’re already published, from Pub Crawl: If you’re expecting that every manuscript you write after you’re published the first time will get put out into the world… well, you might be a little off. Excerpt: “Years ago, a friend told me that getting published was the easy part. It was staying published that was difficult. I laughed a little. I died inside.”