A little about me and this blog
As an aspiring writer, I spend hours combing the internet for all the tips and advice floating around out there. I love reading other people's blogs, and I especially enjoy it when they get annoyed about the same things that annoy me. I hate it, though, when I come across idiots who clearly have no idea what they're talking about, and who have taken it upon themselves to spread their misinformation around cyberspace. Then I thought, hey! I could BE one of those idiots!
And thus this blog was born.
Who is Emily Pryor, and why the crap should I listen to a thing she says?
I'm not really anybody, yet, and there's a pretty good chance you shouldn't listen to me. I'm just a college student who dreams of being published someday (sooner rather than later, if I can get my act together, but more on that here.
I do have a couple of traits which make me (in my own oh-so-humble opinion) qualified to dole out advice, and those are:
1. I read voraciously. I love stories of all shapes and flavors, from the almost universally disdained (Twilight) to the ignored (L.M. Montgomery's books, besides the Anne books) to the almost unanimously revered (Jane Austen, Douglas Adams, Shakespeare).
2. I am a stickler for grammar (although I play it pretty fast and loose with my parentheticals--had you noticed?) I always end up catching the typos or logistical errors in the books I read. Not that this makes me infallible! It's always harder to edit yourself than other people, but I am pretty good at the technical side of writing.
3. I've been writing since I was 13; true, the material I produced was of about the quality you'd expect from a book-hungry, socialization-starved teen (think lots of fantasy creatures with bizarre names that look like I had a seizure all over the keyboard), but I've learned from that and moved on.
Sort of.
4. I have good taste. I'm sort of stuck between the "having good taste" and "producing good material" stages, as discussed by Ira Glass in this excellent speech on creativity, but it's there, and because of that, I give good advice. For instance, I would have advised myself that the previous sentence had an awful lot of commas.
So what is this blog for?
As a (relatively) young person who dreams of writing professionally someday, I thrive on the encouraging (and discouraging, and enraging, and hilarious) things said by other aspiring writers out there. What I want to do is to post the kinds of things I would find helpful, and hopefully inspire or encourage other people out there who are like me, just starting out, unsure of what they're doing, but sure that they don't want to stop.
Oh, and the name, if it's not apparent, is a collision between the Spanish word for "word", palabra, and the magic words "abracadabra, abrakazaam". I've been using PalabraCadabra as a screen name for years, and would just like to say that if you read it anywhere else, I'd bet they stole it from me ;)
Leave me a comment to say hi, or check out my BrandYourself profile thingy here.
And thus this blog was born.
Who is Emily Pryor, and why the crap should I listen to a thing she says?
I'm not really anybody, yet, and there's a pretty good chance you shouldn't listen to me. I'm just a college student who dreams of being published someday (sooner rather than later, if I can get my act together, but more on that here.
I do have a couple of traits which make me (in my own oh-so-humble opinion) qualified to dole out advice, and those are:
1. I read voraciously. I love stories of all shapes and flavors, from the almost universally disdained (Twilight) to the ignored (L.M. Montgomery's books, besides the Anne books) to the almost unanimously revered (Jane Austen, Douglas Adams, Shakespeare).
2. I am a stickler for grammar (although I play it pretty fast and loose with my parentheticals--had you noticed?) I always end up catching the typos or logistical errors in the books I read. Not that this makes me infallible! It's always harder to edit yourself than other people, but I am pretty good at the technical side of writing.
3. I've been writing since I was 13; true, the material I produced was of about the quality you'd expect from a book-hungry, socialization-starved teen (think lots of fantasy creatures with bizarre names that look like I had a seizure all over the keyboard), but I've learned from that and moved on.
Sort of.
4. I have good taste. I'm sort of stuck between the "having good taste" and "producing good material" stages, as discussed by Ira Glass in this excellent speech on creativity, but it's there, and because of that, I give good advice. For instance, I would have advised myself that the previous sentence had an awful lot of commas.
So what is this blog for?
As a (relatively) young person who dreams of writing professionally someday, I thrive on the encouraging (and discouraging, and enraging, and hilarious) things said by other aspiring writers out there. What I want to do is to post the kinds of things I would find helpful, and hopefully inspire or encourage other people out there who are like me, just starting out, unsure of what they're doing, but sure that they don't want to stop.
Oh, and the name, if it's not apparent, is a collision between the Spanish word for "word", palabra, and the magic words "abracadabra, abrakazaam". I've been using PalabraCadabra as a screen name for years, and would just like to say that if you read it anywhere else, I'd bet they stole it from me ;)
Leave me a comment to say hi, or check out my BrandYourself profile thingy here.
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