Amanda Helms

Category: Writing

  • 3 observations re: ideas

    Asking writers where their ideas come from is like asking oysters how they make pearls (or cancer; take your pick). Ideas propagate like rabbits listening to Marvin Gaye on loop. As with children, it is difficult to tell if ideas are ugly unless they belong to someone else.

  • Puss in Boots

    One of my writing goals for this year is to practice more short fiction (at least one short story per quarter). So I figured I’d participate in Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Fairy Tales Remixed. I chose “Puss in Boots.” For my subgenre, the random number generator chose “superhero.” The result follows. Puss in Boots…

  • Why I hate the criticism “A man/woman would never day/say [thing]”

    Last week, Chuck Wendig wrote a post on perception of gender in novels. (Warning: his site includes many words that workplaces and schools likely block, and while I do think my description of the post is accurate, his own title is far more . . . colorful.) The gist is that he’s been accused of writing…

  • Why I write spec fic: A (partial) manifesto

    (Edit: I’d scheduled this post to go live on Wednesday the 4th, but somehow WordPress missed posting it, and I didn’t realize till now.) In my senior seminar at college nearly ten years ago, we had an audit participate in the course. If you are clairvoyant (see what I did there with the spec fic…

  • Another year of no NaNo

    I’d had a thought about putting up a post about unicorns, but couldn’t quite figure out what would go in it aside from a rambling retrospect on my wallpaper choices as a six-year-old. So herewith, a post about writing, which I know I’m ostensibly supposed to avoid, as back in the day I was all, I…

  • The Emotional Journey of Writing: A Line Graph

    (Click anywhere on the image to enlarge.)

  • An open letter to the fellow conference attendee who asked me if I write “real science fiction”

    Note: this format is unashamedly stolen from McSweeny’s Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond. Check it out. Dear Fellow Conference Attendee Who Asked Me if I Write “Real Science Fiction,” Let me begin by saying that on the whole, I had a very good time at the Colorado Gold Conference…

  • Work world aphorism: “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.”

    I’m back home from the Colorado Gold Conference. Or rather, now that I am home, I will not have to drive out to southeast Denver for anymore workshops or speakers. Because I’m cheap and did not get a hotel room. Maybe next year. I digress.* In any case, one thing that stuck me during the…

  • Pitch for my novel

    In slightly under two weeks I will be attending the Colorado Gold Writing Conference, during which I’ll find out if my submission, Second Sun, won first place in the speculative fiction category of the Colorado Gold Writing Conference. Definitely nice to be a finalist and all, but I did have an “Oh, crap” moment when…

  • On being a POHC writer

    I’ve been thinking about race recently, and how I fit in to it. Which is a somewhat of an odd concept, one might say, how one fits into race: because to most people, it ought to be obvious. Visual. Sometimes auditory, due to the inflections, timbre, phraseology, and dialect of one’s voice. Either way, out…