One of the most common mistakes I find in books by new authors is the tendency to put in the wrong things:  they spend pages on things that should be left out, then jump right over the things that should be included.  The result is a work that feels unbalanced, giving weight to stuff the [...]

No doubt many of you are familiar with Clarke’s law:  any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  It’s been speculated that one reason why science fiction as a genre has lost some ground to fantasy is that we seem to be living in an age of magic.  With all of the extraordinary technologies at [...]

One of the questions I’m frequently asked is how you go about creating, not a single book, but a coherent series. Fantasy readers love series books.  Once they get excited about a world and its inhabitants, they like to go inside and shut the door, living in there for book after book:  as long as [...]

Part of the fun of writing historical fantasy is seeking out historical events and combining them with my own ideas to create something new, and hopefully, engaging for the audience.  I once heard a historical fiction author describe the work as like “doing card tricks in the dark.”  The trouble with historical fiction is that, [...]