I mentioned before that the webcomic Girl Genius features my current favorite fictional female character, but there’s more to the series that I happen to like. One of those elements is how it helps illustrate one of the harder concepts in writing fiction, the fractal nature of storytelling. One of Read more…
I’ve always thought of myself as a primarily linear writer. I start writing on page one, and I keep writing until I reach the end. I rarely, if ever, skip around while writing a draft. I’ve occasionally written a dramatic scene from the center of a book before writing the Read more…
Pending confirmation from DAW, the title is going to be either: Journalists and Dragons: Stories of the Cleveland Portal or Journalists, Dragons and Dwarves: Stories of the Cleveland Portal I think I’m more partial to the second one. UPDATE: Sheila didn’t like the word “Journalist” so the title will be: Read more…
Just a little small celebratory post, I’ve passed the halfway mark in both the Apotheosis trilogy and the current book Heretics. Which, since this is the middle book of the trio, it sort of makes sense both milestones would coincide. Yesterday the Hamsters eviscerated another 20K of this draft and Read more…
The good news is that DAW’s going to re-issue my two Cleveland Portal novels, Dragons of the Cuyahoga and Dwarves of Whiskey Island in an omnibus edition due out August 2009. W000t! The bad news, Sheila at DAW told me this yesterday, and she needs me to give her a Read more…
I’ve destroyed an entire star-system, simultaneously blown up a network of a hundred-odd wormholes across about 100 light years, and I’ve just carpet-bombed an entire planet with pure distilled singularity. . . And I’m only half done with the trilogy.
A recent email reminded me of a panel I was on at at Context. The subject was about making dystopias, which seems an oddly timely subject. One of the things we discussed a little bit was the fact that there can be a number of different kinds of dystopia, depending Read more…
I don’t think anyone would say I’m easy on the characters in my books. Almost all of them, in fact, are put through several flavors of hell before the end. I have noticed something lately, a developing trend in my more recent work, that has bearing on the kind of Read more…
I now present to you some choice quotes from Mr. Horace Engdahl, senior member of the awards jury for the Nobel Prize in literature: Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the Read more…
According to Charlie Stross: We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF. He has a few points about the hazards of planning a near-future SF novel in a plausible fashion, the most important IMHO being the long Read more…