Spec Tech: Conlanging 7 — Who’s what?

This is the seventh in a series of posts “live-blogging” the creation of a fictional language from scratch, with the help of our readers.  We plan to construct a functional language one piece at a time, incorporating suggestions and preferences from our audience along the way.  You can find a listing of our previous installments……

The Clarion Writer’s Craft #39 – What makes a poem SF/Fantasy?

Karen A. Romanko is editor of four speculative fiction and poetry anthologies, SPORTY SPEC: GAMES OF THE FANTASTIC (2007), CINEMA SPEC: TALES OF HOLLYWOOD AND FANTASY (2009), RETRO SPEC: TALES OF FANTASY AND NOSTALGIA (2010), and JACK-O’-SPEC: TALES OF HALLOWEEN AND FANTASY (coming September 2011), all from Raven Electrick Ink. She has seen over 100……

Spec Tech: The Habitable Zone

Recent astronomy news gave us word of a planet around a double star system. This is the first ever planet around a binary star that has been positively identified (outside of tataouine – but that was in a galaxy far, far away). This is encouraging both because it looks like a habitable location, but also……

The Writer’s Craft #38 – To Hiss the Unhissable

Joe Mahoney is a broadcaster with the CBC, an author of short stories, and a member of SF Canada. His Blog, Assorted Nonsense, is online at http://www.assortednonsense.com/. Far be it from me to criticize someone of J.K.Rowling’s stature. Obviously she knocked Harry Potter out of the park. That kind of success is almost beyond criticism.……

The Writer’s Craft #37 – Story Killers

This week’s feature is from Eli Effinger-Weintraub who blogs at The Back Booth (http://backbooth.thesane.net/) Eli is self-described as: “Your average queer, atheistic, bicycle-obssessed, steampunk-lovin’ Pagan writer. Beloved of one wife, owned by two cats. Copyeditor by trade.” Her work appears in Steampunk Tales: Issue 5, edited by G.D. Falksen. “Why don’t we just shoot the……