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Up ‘n’ Changing …Everything? A Writer Rewrites
I’m still not fully sure what in tarnation I was thinking, rewriting around 30,000 words in a week, and so very close to a critical e-book deadline. And yet, on January 3, when I reread my second novella in the Menagerie Mysteries series, The Moon Is Not My Name, I’d had a sinking feeling that…
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11 Considerations When Writing Characters from Other Demographics
Hi folks! Today I’m going to be talking writing craft one-on-one with a few writers, and one of the day’s key topics will involve the question of how best to write people from other demographics. My answer to this, on the surface, is pretty simple: Write people! But in practice, writing is an emotional exercise,…
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Confidence and the Creator: A Lesson from the First Week of Self-Publishing
This past week I learned an unexpected lesson about e-publishing. An important lesson! But a tricky one. Some folks bee-line for self-publishing because they think it’s an easy way to make money and become an accomplished writer. They know in their guts that their work is good enough, irrespective of how much they’ve read in…
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Please Be Honest vs. If You Loved It: On the Weird World of Reviews
I’m an odd duck of a writer in many ways. I love receiving feedback once a story’s published — whether it’s good, middling, or negative — but I cannot stand the idle critiques of careless readers when a work is in progress. (I’m thankful, then, to have found one beta reader who understands my aims,…
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The Debts We Owe & The Thanks We Give
I was never big into fan culture — never keen to get someone’s autograph, or be in the same room as a famous creator. I still cringe on the rare occasion when people suggest that might be something I look forward to myself — having a “fan club”. Oof. No. Can’t we all just be…
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Playing Around with Narrative Tropes
A few years back, a dear friend told me that he and his girlfriend had spent a night in a cabin with limited entertainment: VHS copies of Road House, and Ghost. “Awesome, so you watched Road House?” “No, she chose Ghost.” Ah. Of course. I’ve always leaned toward the action flicks, myself, and although my…
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Science Fiction Mysteries (a.k.a. Genre is a Construct)
It’s been said that “all stories are mystery stories” — a charming idea, for reasons I’ll discuss today, but also too prescriptive, so let’s modify it from the outset: “all stories can be mystery stories”. There’s a lot to love about looking at literature this way, both as a reader and as a writer. Stories…
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The Writer Returns to the Scene of the Theme
So, it’s five days until Third Planet Fall Down releases, and I’m chuckling today over how difficult it is for a writer to escape who they are in their writing. The “work will out”, as the saying goes — and oh my, does it ever, when it comes to being made to confront our greatest…
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What Is Self-Publishing “Good For”?
What does medieval writing culture have in common with self-publishing in today’s digital world? Less than it could, and maybe should!
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Of all the lengths that SF&F can take…
One of my favourite points of literary confusion between English and Spanish is that a “novel” in English is a “novela” in Spanish… but a “novella” is treated as quite a different literary category in the English-speaking world. For Nebula-Award-nomination purposes, a “novella” is a work between 17,500 and 40,000 words. (In Spanish, the term…
Sí, Hay Futuros Ediciones 