Inky Linky Love 08.07.2011

Oops, kind of late with the linky post this time. But since I'd banned myself from Google Reader for much of the week, I had hundreds upon hundreds of posts to wade through, and that's basically what I spent yesterday doing. I think next week I'll go back to checking the reader when I have a spare moment; it's too daunting to tackle so many at a time.

But wow, there are so many beautiful posts on the writing journey in the blogosphere lately. These amazing writers are open about the struggles and challenges that accompany being a writer while being incredibly inspiring with their perseverance and hard work. I hope you'll check out these posts if you haven't already:

AWESOME POSTS ON THE WRITING JOURNEY

• S.J. Kincaid wrote a beautiful post on Ellen Oh's blog about why she wouldn't have changed anything about her writing journey, despite being obsessed for years with a manuscript that would never be published.
• In a similar vein, Natalie Whipple recounts her journey to publication on Adventures in Children's Publishing, sharing her struggles and heartaches and how she fought through them.
• On her own blog, Natalie explains why she's not jealous of Kiersten White's successes and how to deal with jealousy in general.
• Speaking of which, Kiersten is amazing as well. This week she wrote a post on talent versus hard work and why both are important. 
• And the fabulous C.J. Redwine wraps everything up — the journey, the hard work, the success, and how to handle others' good news — in this post on what it feels like to get a book deal.

Amazing articles, right? And here are posts on everything else. It kinda kills me to throw them all together instead of organizing them into separate categories as I usually do, but if I did that I would mostly have only one link per category, and that would annoy me even more. Thus, this compromise:

EVERYTHING ELSE

• Worldbuilding: Adam Heine has a great post with tips on creating your own fantasy slang.
• Dialogue: Sara Furlong Burr gives advice on how to write compelling dialogue.
• Characterization: Savannah Foley talks about writing realistic, flawed characters by harnessing your inner contrarian.
• Plot: Juliette Wade talks about balancing tender and terrible moments, and Kat Zhang underscores the importance of consequences to character decisions.
• Revision: Danyelle Leafty at the Query Tracker Blog provides a great step-by-step pre-revision guide.
• Growth: Beth Revis shares about the writer's learning curve, and the Storytelling by Ira Glass video she embeds in her post is so inspiring.
• More Linda: Over on my personal blog, I wrote a post about why I won't tell you to "be yourself" — I see that advice all the time on writing blogs, but I don't find it particularly meaningful or useful.

Oh, and there's a new tab under my header, featuring awards and memes I've been tagged with. It's entirely Carrie Butler's fault that I had to make one of those. Thanks for thinking of me, Carrie! Though I'd appreciate a less awkward one next time. ;)

In other news, I am still horribly behind on Camp NaNo. But I don't feel all that guilty about it, haha. I think the best part about participating is learning to develop a consistent writing habit, so even if I don't make it to 50k (I'm pretty sure I won't), I'm happy as long as I'm making some progress on my WIP and knocking out a few hundred words every day.

Hope your writing plans are going better than mine, and have an incredible weekend! :D