A lot of good links this week.

Brett & Kate McKay from The Art of Manliness

The History of Obstacle Courses for Military Fitness, Sport, and All-Around Toughness

I’m using a military obstacle course for my third GALCOM Universe Book, Cursed Planet. What better way to train for heavy gravity? While hunting down resources online for it, I ran across this nifty link about the history. Lots of historic photos.

John Allsopp from A List Apart

A Dao of Web Design

This is a fascinating look at how web design evolved, which starts by using the example of how TV evolved from radio.  The eBook industry is still very early in its own development (only about 10 years–can you believe that?), so it provokes the question about how ebooks might evolve in the future.

Piper Bayard and Jay Homes on Bayard & Holmes

Analyzing News: Considering the Source

With all the inaccurate news getting into major newspapers, it’s hard to navigate through what’s true and what isn’t.  This gives some guidelines for figuring out what’s fact and what might not be.  The guidelines are pretty sensible and allow you to make the decisions.

C. Hope Clark on Funds For Writers

What Attracts Readers to Books?

This was a survey of about 5,000 people on Facebook, and the results are pretty interesting.  Most readers pick a book based on genre.  Which makes sense.  If you walk into a bookstore or a library, you have to go to the right shelf to find the books you want to read and those are categorized as genre.

Margie Lawson

Deep Editing, Rhetorical Devices, and More

The lecture description doesn’t do this justice, I think because she’s focusing more on the EDITS system.  This lecture covers writing in depth–five senses, character opinions.  Best coverage I’ve seen of rhetorical devices and how to use them in novels.  And one hidden benefit…it covers an aspect of pacing  (backloading).  Loads of examples from best selling writers.

My version was from 2011, so there may be changes.  It came in a zip file with Word document.  Formatting made it hard to read.

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