Metaphors — Add Color to Your Writing

What the Heck's a Metaphor?

Metaphors are figures of speech that bring drama, color, texture, vision, history, action, or thrill to your work. For example:

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

~William Shakespeare

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

~Mark Twain

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world to so high, like a diamond in the sky.

~Jane Taylor

Hmmmm...anyone see a theme?

Appropriating Inspiration at BayCon 2014

Confession:  I've let writing lapse lately and that feels BAD.  Maybe that's happened to you, too.  Life gets in the way, and it's hard enough to put one foot in front of the other, let alone put your fingers on the keyboard.

Seeking inspiration and writerly motivation, I spent this past Saturday and Sunday at Baycon 2014, one of the larger science fiction and fantasy conventions held annually in the San Francisco Bay Area. Along with Denise Tanaka and Jennifer Carson, I happily threw myself into the open arms of my fellow fen and found inspiration and motivation aplenty.  Now here I am, writing, my fingers feeling fine as they tap the keys.

I woke at 5:00 in the morning, and the first song of the day on shuffle was Laura Line's "Dreams."  Good omen!  Dreams inspire (several of my short stories have come from dreams that I've remembered upon waking), and the con would be filled with fellow dreamers.  

Characters in Search of a Plot

I got invited to join my first SF/F writer's group after attending a workshop at a Baycon many years ago. I was so excited! I had taken creative writing classes in college, and I had been part of a mixed-genre writer's critique group for a couple of years. This was the first group dedicated to speculative fiction. They would understand me, at last! It had a couple of professionally published authors, along with novices like me. I had high hopes, back then, that with a little spit and polish my manuscript would be rescued from the slush pile, and I'd be the next Marion Zimmer Bradley.