March 28, 2020

Worldbuilding Worksheet

Back when I was a Writer-in-Residence for my local library, one of the workshops I ran was about Worldbuilding. I made a whole worksheet packet about it, including a chart where people can fill in facts about their own fictional worlds.

That being said, this isn't my own worldbuilding process. I'm good at letting my mind wander and make connections where it will, but I tried to break down that process and represent it on paper for other people to use. It might be helpful to some of you out there who may be struggling with worldbuilding, or who just want to beef-up the details of your world. Feel free to share it with any other writers you know.

You can download the worksheet by clicking on this link (it's a Word file instead of a PDF, for reasons relating to my cheapness and not wanting to pay for the ability to do both landscape and portrait mode in Canva).

That's all I have this week, as I'm working on a Love & Chaos related project and need to devote my time to that. Stay tuned!

March 22, 2020

Something Salty, Something Sweet: Feminism in Fiction

To make up for not posting last week, I offer two video essays:


Something Salty: Faux Feminism in Fiction



Something Sweet: Pro Feminism in Fiction


March 1, 2020

Library Life: Dewey Made Easy


Last time, I discussed call numbers on youth literature. Today, I tackle nonfiction, which is organized according to Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC, for short). Unfortunately, some people hear the phrase “Dewey Decimal System” and give up on the spot, sure that this century-and-a-half old system is far too cumbersome for the laymen to work with. Not so! And, as someone who is positively in love with nonfiction, I’m here to tell you how to navigate it.

See, Melvil Dewey was obsessed with simplification and classification, even from his youth. He decided that there ought to be a way to categorize all human knowledge, and so created his decimal system. There are ten main classes, broken into a thousand subclasses—these are the numbers to the left of the decimal point in any nonfiction call number you come across. The numbers to right of the decimal, in the tenths, hundredths, thousandths, and so on places, are even smaller, more specific categories. Essentially, Dewey found a way to place any subject into a large category, and then specify where it should live by creating more and more little sub-sub-sub categories. Brilliant!