I love fantastic and wondrous stories.  Since I was very young, I was entranced by stories of chivalrous knights and fair ladies and slaying dragons.  Stories about spaceships whizzing about and people shooting lasers and blasters.  These stories enabled me to escape the dreary circumstances of my life into a world where anything seemed possible, … Read more

Ever since I was young I’ve loved to read. But the books I feel the most comfortable with are mass-market paperbacks. In a form of escapism, I read exhaustively, reading the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes when I was 7, as well as an old English version of Le Morte de Artur (which, as I recall, … Read more

We have to live in the world, not in some ivory tower, and this exercise can be useful in thinking about what values you want to espouse and support as a writer. There are also marketing and publishing implications, and you get to play around with things like “branding”. Back in the day, you could … Read more

2020 seems like it has lasted something like 40 years so far.  Every month, every week, sometimes even every day seems to bring some new nightmare.  My home, Oregon, is virtually on fire, and the Air Quality rating through most of Portland has been staying at levels marked dangerous or hazardous or avoid for days, … Read more

Having a specific or set lexicon for a work of fiction, especially speculative fiction, can be a highly useful tool.  It can provide clues to setting, characterization, motivation, and emotion subtly.  It can provide a sense of strangeness, distance or closeness, as well as time, simply through choosing words.  You can also unearth old words, … Read more

One of the most common refrains given to writers, and a piece of early advice I got from my dad, was that if you want to be a writer, you have to read a lot. I think this is very true, but there are different kinds of words and different kinds of reading. If you’re … Read more

Great villains often make for great stories. And in the last few years, there’ve been a number of memorable retellings of tales from the point of view of antagonists. Some of this began with post-modern deconstructions of faerie tales, asking questions like “why would a witch be luring two children to her house to eat … Read more

Sometimes people self-publish a book on Amazon, and it seems like nothing happens.  Nobody is really reading it, nobody is talking about it, nobody is reviewing it.  Maybe you’ve done all the right steps, set up a website, promoting on social media, running a newsletter.  Readers are not exactly subject to a paucity of choices.  … Read more

You slave and slave: outlining, drafting, editing, rewriting, getting beta reads, re-writing, steeping, re-writing, and finally submitting. Some time passes. Maybe a lot of time passes. Maybe “time begins seriously to pass”. Finally, you (if you’re lucky) get a rejection. You feel rejected; you are dejected, you’re not respected, your work wasn’t elected. Even worse … Read more

This post contains affiliate links, which if you click and purchase the project, give me a small kickback. It can be very tempting to establish all sorts of details about a world, creating a virtual encyclopedia, or a set of linked wikipedias, meandering about and naming heritages and establishing bloodlines and considering traditions in towns … Read more