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I have, in my time, both acted as and utilized beta readers. With that, I’ve found that different authors have different policies in how they treat their beta readers. I have rules on how I deal with them. They are unpaid volunteers that are doing me a great service without any promise of return. I…
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I have a growing number of draft posts. It almost feels like I’ve been actively updating this journal because I have so many posts started that the interaction was initiated even if it wasn’t completed. I’ve been journaling in one form or another for a decade now, opening my first LiveJournal account in February of…
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Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted. Mea culpa. I tore a tendon in my shoulder and the recuperation (ongoing) has really thrown my routines for a loop. I’ve been working from home a lot or not working and going to physical therapy a lot. It may have been a good habit to…
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I tell Liz Poole all the time that I’m never going to write Urban Fantasy. But an opening line while I was driving from physical therapy gave me an idea for a character that turned an espionage thriller plot I had been ruminating on into a genuine urban fantasy. The original espionage was inspired by…
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Supers fiction is perhaps the smallest niche of sf/f. Supers can be fun or it can be incredibly cliche (if you grew up reading comics–which if you’re interested in supers fiction is a good bet). I tend to think of supers creatively as graphic novels for that same background of comics reading. I can’t think…
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I have a few drafts that I’ll probably never publish (that happens from time to time), but I have a really good reason why. I’ve been writing like Robert E. Howard. Not specifically in his style, but when he wrote Conan, he said that the barbarian himself stood…
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I’ve commented before that there are some parts of my beloved genre that just bore the shit out of me. “New” is really “The same but from a different persecptive.” How can you tell? Because our titles sound like they came out of a sausage maker. Fantasy in, delicious sausage out. One link looks much…
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When I get up in the morning, I write. When I get to work, I spend all day in a cubicle on a computer. When I head home, I write. When I get home, I am often on a computer. I live the classic American sedentary lifestyle. I type 99 words per minutes according to…