Useful Websites

Every site needs its links page, and mine is no different. Here you'll find various resources for the budding writer of speculative fiction, with due emphasis given to UK sites where appropriate since I am British.

General Resources

• Hatrack River - the Official Website of Orson Scott Card is a well-established site full of essays, book and movie reviews, forums, chat and of course "Uncle Orson's Writing Class", a Q&A series full of advice and wisdom. Card is my all-time favourite writer on writing, and his website rarely disappoints.

• Forward Motion: one of my favourite sites, with discussion forums, chatrooms and much more. A great opportunity to meet like-minded people and share ideas.

• Absolute Write: Another great site for meeting writers, plus they do a lot to help combat scammers like PublishAmerica.

• Writer's BBS: another good forum site, where I used to hang out and was even a moderator for a while.

• NaNoWriMo is an annual event in which participants aim to write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel in 30 days! It takes place in November each year, and you can sign up between 1st October and 30th November (though the latter is probably a bit too late!).

• Author Network - a great site for writers around the world, and in the UK in particular. Hordes of links to writing groups, events, publishers, agents, etc.

Fantasy and SF

• Mark Rosenfelder's Metaverse: particularly useful for those of us who are interested in inventing languages, but has some good articles about SF, comics, etc, too.

• The Official Holly Lisle Author Website, as well as being full of info and news about Holly's work, has free e-books in PDF format and some excellent world-building tutorials with an fantasy slant.

• Orion's Arm is a hard SF online shared world for writers, roleplayers and computer gamers, inspired by the work of such authors as Iain M Banks. Although still very much a work in progress, it is packed with ideas and information on plausible future technology, especially powerful AIs.

Insider Blogs

Thanks to the Internet, we now have unprecedented access to the people who are going to buy our books - make the most of it!

Agents

• John Jarrold - a top UK agent for SF&F
• Simon Trewin - another good UK agent, though non-SF&F
• Rachel Vater - a top US agent for SF&F

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