Supposedly, every fiction writer has a theme.  Have you ever noticed a pattern with your favorite authors?  The heroines in their stories are always bumbling or a bit quirky.  The heroes are always dark and forbidding but have a well-hidden soft spot that is key to the story.  Or maybe in each book there’s some [...]

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, [...]