There’s a marvelous post over at Io9 that you really must read. It’s titled, “Inside the writers room: Top scifi TV writers reveal tricks of the trade,” but it really isn’t about genre writing, and it really isn’t about tricks of the trade. What it is, is an in-depth exploration Read more…
If you’re a writer populating these here interwebs, and you don’t know about the site TV tropes, you should do yourself a favor and rectify that right now. What is it? It is a wiki that deals with, well, tropes in fiction: character types, situations, plot devices and so on. Read more…
I go on about plot and worldbuilding a lot, because those are my strengths. Both are similar in that they’re largely exercises in logic— taking a premise, either in the environment or the story itself, and just following the consequences to an inevitable conclusion. I tend to deal with most Read more…
I can see why a lot of people would hate it. But then, again, there are certainly arguments for what they did end up doing. Me, I teared up during the episode, had a bit of a WTF when Christian opened up his mouth at the end, and spent a Read more…
In the interstitial time between finishing the Messiah draft, and working on the rewrite, I’m working on a few book proposals to shop around since I’ve become a free agent. One of those book proposals has a tentative title Timewalker. Which is all I’m going to tell you about it, Read more…
It is done! The last volume of the Apotheosis Trilogy, Messiah, has just wrapped up at 103K words. (About 3000 words over my mark, which means the final revised draft is going to be even longer.) We have officially capped off the series I began back in 1993 with Forests Read more…
At least that’s the conclusion that Diana Gabaldon has come to. OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters. Of course, I have some different Read more…
And to wrap things up, the opening scene from Profiteer: For a hundred million years the two-kilometer-long Face had stared impassively up at the Martian sky. Dimitri Olmanov had only been visiting it regularly for the past century. The first time he had seen it, Dimitri had needed a pressure Read more…
Here we have the first part of Stranger Inside: Jimmy didn’t know how the fight started. He’d been standing in front of his locker and he remembered watching that asshole Frank Bradley pass by. In Jimmy’s mind there was an abrupt cut from that, directly to the sound of his Read more…
Now, here’s the opening passage from Wolfbreed. In the darkest woods in Burzenland, south of the Carpathian mountains, a knight of the Order of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans at Jerusalem, Brother Semyon von Kassel, ran as if he was in pursuit of the devil himself. Mud Read more…