Each month we recap some of the resources and advice that you can find every day on our Slack Writing Group.

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February-March 2019

Press News

– Shades of Pride, our fifth call for submissions, has ended its open call! Thank you to the dozens of writers who submitted a work with an LGBTQIA2+ voice, character, and/or theme to this collection benefiting True Colors United, an organization that implements innovative solutions to youth homelessness that focus on the unique experiences of LGBTQ young people.
– Our next Open Mic Night is March 16; sign up now to read something! This is our North American time zone-friendly version, starting at 9 pm EST.
– The lineup for Kindred, our fourth collection, is live! Check out the writers and titles that will be featured in our upcoming Spring release centred on family. (Want to get notified when we drop our pre-order? Click here!)

Resources We Loved

– “When Social Media Goes After Your Book, What’s The Right Response?” (Thanks, Pen!)
– “The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami” (Thanks, Lyle!)
– Eric Smith’s “Perfect Pitch” (Thanks, Sarah!)
– “Thriller Story Structure: The Complete Series” (Thanks, David!)
– “Atlas of Endangered Languages” (Thanks again, Lyle!)
– A fake face-generator to inspire your character creation (Thanks, Lila!)
– “Things to Consider When Constructing a Humour Story” (You’ll have to join the Slack group for this one. Thanks, Shannon!)

Advice We Listened To

Neek gave us a fantastic run down of how to create languages in our #craft channel:

“I reduce languages down to four major components: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Lexicon.

1. Phonology: The human mouth is capable of making hundreds of different kinds of sounds (phones). No language uses all possible sounds, and rather they’re approximated into phonemes, which are more platonic than realistic. The difference between as said (phones) and as understood (phonemes) is phonetic/phonemic. Learning the IPA is a good starting ground for this.

• Orthography: A subsection of phonology, which is how the sounds relate to writing. The Latin script is ill-equipped for any language that isn’t Latin, so conventions (diactrics, digraphs, etc.) must be utilized. This is a convention, but in terms of making a usable language, necessary. Especially for writing.

2. Morphology: The way elements within the language combine or transform to express grammatical concepts like number, case, person, and so forth. This is important because it determines grammar, or at least the easy part. Do you want ablaut or biconsonantal roots, or primarily left-branching chains of prefixes? Where does it fall on the spectrum of synthetic~agglutinative~isolated type of languages? Do you have cases? How do verbs express anything? How can you derive one type of word to another?
3. Syntax: How individual words relate to each other. What are the rules? Do possessives precede or follow the noun they modify? Where does the verb fall? If there’s coordinating agreement (adjectives to nouns, nouns to verbs), how do you operate those? How do sentences coordinate and subordinate with each other? How are questions asked, conditionals, comparatives, what is the minimum number of elements to make a complete sentence? And so forth.
4. Lexicon: Your word base. Obviously, this is informed by all of the above.”

Writers We Cheered On

– Shannon Carpenter shared At-Home Parent Promise Kept, Struggle to Let Them Go Begins, published in City Dads Group.
– Deck Matthews is looking for book reviewers for his self-published The First of Shadows.
– David Clark shared his editorial services as a copyeditor, line editor, translator, and more, as well as his audiobook narration services.
– Lila Krishna published Ugly Fruit in Story of the Week, a Medium-based short story publisher founded by #tldrwriters. Also on Story of the Week this month is The Third Limit by Lyle Enright and Fog of War by Taylor Crawford.

Books We Read

– Commemorating Black History Month, TL;DR Press co-founder and Print Production Manager Camden M. Collins shared her experience growing up and how representation in books, even for a self-proclaimed nerd, is important, as well as a list of recommendations of books by black authors from #tldrwriters!
– 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (Thanks, Lila!)
– House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (Thanks, Joe!)

Events

– We hosted our second Teal Deer Open Mic Night in our Discord server with readings by Penfold, David Clark, Joe Butler, Callum Colback, and Sarah Linders.
– We also hosted a one-day workshop on “How to Pitch Your Work Online”, hosted by Sarah Linders. The workshop was a success, and we can’t wait to host our next one! More details in the Slack group and on our community calendar.

Join in!

Want access to all the above as well as craft chat, beta swaps, write-ins, and a chance to connect daily with a talented group of writers? Apply to join the #tldrwriters Slack group!