This month sees the omnibus re-issue of Forests of the Night and Fearful Symmetries in a single snazzy new package: The Moreau Quartet Volume One. For those of you that are worried about breaking up of the original Moreau trilogy, no worries. A) Fearful Symmetries is a direct sequel to Read more…
Last weekend I had a fun time at the Confluence convention in Pittsburgh. One of the panels I attended was titled “7 Things That Every SF/F Story Contains.” Kudos to the panel moderator Joshua Palmatier who managed to be the best moderator of any panel I was on, and that Read more…
While this blog post I read conflates a number of issues that I think are unrelated, it raises an issue that I think is valid for most authors to think about. It is the nature of most fiction, especially genre fiction, to focus on a central character, the protagonist. This Read more…
For various reasons I’ve been pondering thrillers as a genre lately, considering the directions of future projects. One of the nice things about SFF is the fact that it is the universal donor of literary genres. Tropes from science fiction and fantasy can be mixed with almost any other genre Read more…
So SF Signal led me to a review of a rather odd play with the provocative title (review title, not play title) “Why Are So Many Fictional Utopias as Terrifying as Dystopias?” This is a subject I’ve touched on before. But the review’s author hits on something I haven’t touched on, Read more…
Two things converged in my head recently. I didn’t comment about the whole Game of Thrones rape kerfuffle last month. Mostly because I don’t watch Game of Thrones. But the controversy about it seemed (to me) to spring from a deep conflict between the contemporary ethos of sexual morality and a fiction portraying a Read more…
I’ve always liked Stephen King. He counts as one of the significant influences on me as a writer. And reading (listening to) one of his more recent works, 11/22/63, I came to an epiphany about one of the major techniques he uses to keep readers continually turning the pages. Maybe Read more…
Over at Making Light there’s a serious proposal that seems a lot more constructive than the cries of “No Award” and looks as if it addresses the issue with slate voting. It seems to do so without being anti-democratic, needlessly arcane, or open to too much manipulation. I’d hope, despite Read more…
Back in the mid-1980s I read the one line that had the most profound impact on my career as a writer. It was from Vonnegut by way of Gardner Dozois, quoted in his contribution to the book Writing and Selling Science Fiction put out by SFWA in 1977. (Back when Read more…
I just ran across this article on Facebook about how to tell if you’re in a high fantasy novel, which is very reminiscent of the Evil Overlord List that’s been around since the inception of the Internet. It’s worth a read, including the comments which largely continue with the theme. Read more…