A Class by Brandon Sanderson

Hidden away at in the middle of a blog post by Brandon Sanderson, he said that the lectures from his creative writing class were all online.

Say what?

So, I went to check them out. And sure enough, there they were. Each lecture is broken into multiple videos separated more-or-less by topic. Many of the videos also have the notes for the class. In a word, it's awesome! (Thanks to WriteAboutDragons for doing all the hard work.)

Want to know how Brandon plots his books? Go here.

How about advice on participating in a writers group? Got that.

Creating sympathetic characters. Meeting agents. World building. Fight scenes. And more and more. In fact, there are over 15 hours of lectures all online for your learning pleasure.

And if you're like me and don't want to click the next lecture each time, I've got you covered.

I created one, massive playlist that will start at the beginning and play all the way through to the end. Of course, you can start anywhere in the playlist and it will happily load the next video and the next. So you can  sit back and enjoy for as long as you want.

You can find the playlist here.

Personally, I'm going through the lectures as I prepare for Nano next month. I'm just past the class where he talks about creating characters and I'm going through the exercises. If your a video learner, and like Brandon's style of writing, you might like his classes, too.

Go ahead and give them a try. It's free.

* They say a picture is worth a thousand words--this picture surely is. It's titled Secrets by Sarah Horrigan. I got sucked into all the wonderful images on her photo stream, it's well worth your time. In fact, I may contact her and see if she'll let me do a whole blog post on her work. It's great.

Above Water Again

The last six months have been crazy.

No. More than crazy. What's the next step after crazy? Insane? That's basically the same thing.

Hell? That's a bit much, especially considering the Judeo-Christian view of hell as fire and brimstone.

Let's just say, I was solidly across the crazy line. Then, I went to a 90-minute sales presentation where I learned more about hell, and they gave me a voucher for a complimentary trip to a somewhat-hell-like place, and a $30 gift card to a chain restaurant. I think that sums it up nicely.

I'm usually a positive person. I like to look on the bright side, and as a writer of imaginary stories, I can think up a bright side to about anything.

This time was different. After a while, all the problems and challenges started to wear on me. I never became bitter, but I found myself longing for normal. Instead of looking forward and working through my problems, I wanted to take a couple steps backwards and catch my breath.

Not anymore. Break's over. Get back to work!

I needed the breather, but now it's time to get back on my feet. And funny enough, all of my obstacles are starting to look like platforms I can stand on to climb higher. The obstacles didn't change, just the way I see them.

Annoyingly-positive John is back.

And this is what I learned: Before we can make footprints in the sands of life, we first have to decide to stop leaving butt prints. (Besides, then the sand gets all up in your swimming trunks and the drive home is awful.)

Who's with me?

* Alan Light. What a great name for a photographer. When I saw this sand sculpture on Flickr, I thought, "If I'm going to leave any prints in the sand, I want them to look like this."

Multiple Like Buttons on a Single Page (Technical Tuesday)

My last post explained how to put a Like button on a web page. That sets us up nicely to explain how to make different Like buttons for different parts of a page.

For example, imagine you have a page that lists all of your books. You could have a Like button for each of them right below the cover image.

Sound good? Let's get going then.

For the purpose of this post, let's say you have a small-to-medium-sized website. It has a home page, a page about you, a page that lists all your books and stories, and a simple form for contacting you. It's nothing fancy, but it's a start. And it looks good.

Because you read my last post, you added a Like button to your home page. Now, you want to add a Like button for each of your books, but you've got a problem. The way the Like button works, it uses the entire page. Even though you put a button next to each book, they all seem to Like the entire page. That's not what you want.

It's a tricky problem, but there is a solution.

Step 1) More Pages

Because you have to Like whole pages, that means you need to create a separate page for each book.

Each page should have the book cover image and your hook (1-2 sentences that describe your book). Fill in the Open Graph tags just the way I explained in my previous article. The page can also have blurbs, snippets, buy links, ISBN, etc. The key is that the page is devoted to the book.

Don't forget to include a Like button on this page.

Step 2) Can You Feel the Like?

Go back to your main books page--the one that has all your books and stories. Add Like buttons to each one just like you did before. The code will look something like this:


<!-- AddThis Button BEGIN -->
<div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style ">
<a class="addthis_button_facebook_like" fb:like:layout="button_count"></a>
...
<!-- AddThis Button END -->


Here's the key. In the first div tag, add the following attribute:


<!-- AddThis Button BEGIN -->

<div class="addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style " addthis:url="http://url/to/your/book/page">
<a class="addthis_button_facebook_like" fb:like:layout="button_count"></a>
...
<!-- AddThis Button END -->

That's all there is to it.

Now, when someone uses that Like button, it will like the book page just as if they clicked the Like button on the book page itself.

This will work for anything. Just setup a page for the thing you want Liked. Then create a Like button using the page URL. This button can be used on as many different pages as you want.

So, what do you Like? Let me know in the comments.

* Wow! I didn't even know this monument existed before today. It's the monument set up in the square where the Nazis burned books. This particular photo was taken by Chang'r and can be found on Flickr.

How to Add a Facebook Like Button to a Webpage

It's not Tuesday, but this will be a technical post. A few people have asked me about adding Facebook Like buttons to web pages.

Step 1) Facebook and Twitter and Bears, Oh my!

There are so many social networks these days, which ones do you choose?

We've got the big guys: Facebook and Twitter, but what about LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, and StumbleUpon?

Not to mention a metric slew of sites that aren't as popular, or aren't as social, but still have fans who might want to share your stuff: Blogger, Digg, Buffer, Bitly, WordPress, Posterous, Orkut (are they still around?), MySpace (are they still around?),  FriendFeed, Evernote, and dozens more.

*The metric slew is a unit of measure for those who want to sound precise but who really have no clue how much they are talking about.

I'm recommending you go out to AddThis and grab their code. AddThis is used by some big sites. They are simple to use and have a lot of ways to tinker with their stuff if you're the tinkering type.

When you download their code, they'll ask you to create an account. It's not required, so if you want to try them out first, that's fine. Just dismiss the sign-up window.

Here's three examples of their stuff. (The following examples are setup for web pages, so they don't work as effectively on my blog, sorry. I'll do another post specific to blogs in the future.)

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Note: AddThis isn't paying me anything to promote them. For some reason, companies don't want to give me money to promote them. *sigh*

Step 2) Huh?

Have you ever gone to like a webpage and Facebook decides it wants to use the "Email Me" picture of a giant @ sign instead of the site logo, or the description that comes up is the "About the Author" text instead of the first paragraph of the page? Frustrating, isn't it.

You solve these issues for your site using Open Graph tags. These are meta tags you include at the top of your html page that help Facebook and other sites figure out what's most important.

Now, open up your page to edit it and include the following meta tags at the top in the <head></head> section:

  <head>
    ...
    <meta property="og:title" content="***PAGE TITLE HERE***"/>
    <meta property="og:type" content="***CONTENT HERE***"/>
    <meta property="og:url" content="***URL HERE***"/>
    <meta property="og:image" content="***IMAGE HERE***"/>
    ...
  </head>

These tags tell Facebook what title, url and image to use when someone likes your page. The og:type is also interesting, there are a lot of options including "article", "author" (when you're bragging about yourself), "book" (when you're promoting your book), "cause" (when you're spreading the word for your favorite charity), "activity" (when you're announcing your book release party), and quite a few more.

And that's all you have to do. Go ahead and try it out and let me know how it works for you.

Wrap Up

Now you can help Facebook and other sites know how to share your web pages.

In my next blog post, I will show you what you need to do if your page has many different things you want to like. For example, if you have a bunch of different images or videos or quotes and you want people to like each one separately.

Until then, let me know if these steps were helpful for you in the comments below.

* Ah, the open road. There's more to this picture taken by Takver and posted on  Flickr. Especially check out Takver's  holiday set and protest pictures.

Help for NaNoWriMo

It's almost November, and you know what that means. National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. It's when tens of thousands of writers throw caution to the wind and attempt to write a 50,000-word story in a single month.

It's not as crazy as it sounds, but it isn't easy.

My plans are to try something new. I normally write contemporary YA fantasy. I'll stick with fantasy, but change the audience and time period. It'll be good practice and a good break from editing.

The problem is that I have two stories I want to write and I can only do one of them, so here's were you come in. I've written a blurb for each story below. In the comments tell me which one you think sounds the best and why. I'll write whichever wins. I'll also try to post story updates on my blog as I go through the month.

Blurb #1:

The Norse God, Thor, decides to take a long-overdue vacation, and he leaves his mighty hammer in the care of his great, great, great, are-you-still-reading-all-of-these, great, great grandson, Arthur Quirkelsteen, the smallest boy in his fourth-grade class. Arthur first tries to fly to school, but misses it by three states. Then he ruins his class service project--who knew the hammer would refuse to drive nails? But when his secret is discovered by the cafeteria lady he must keep the hammer safe until his great, great, great, he-is-pretty-great, great grandfather returns.

Blurb #2:

Elizabeth stands in the balance between an immoral peace and a war with the gods. She believes in the old gods--creatures who feed on human souls and grant fantastic powers to their followers, but she is also the daughter of a famous industrialist--a man who uses human labor, machines and money to build empires. Will she support the continued sacrifices to appease the gods? Or the slavery enforced by the industrialists? Or will her actions start a war that could spell the end of her society?

Leave a comment below and tell me which one you like better.

* You gotta wonder how long that place has been looking for help. I hope you guys step up and send help a little faster. It made a great picture for Brenda Gottsabend. You can find it on Flickr.