As a child, I lived in the far reaches of the city, then in the suburbs of Chicago. I didn’t know much about the downtown area, nearly twenty miles away by electric train, except that I always looked forward to my infrequent trips there. My mom treated me every holiday, taking me downtown to see [...]

Look up process on Wikipedia and you’ll see over forty definitions. The one I think most clearly relates to us as authors defines process as “activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product for customers.” In our case, that product is the story, the manuscript. Like the word process, there are different methods [...]

When it comes to people, you can miss a lot if you judge by that first superficial impression. The same is true with books, and yet we all do it, don’t we? That’s the purpose of a book cover. It’s release day for Body Heat from Kensington Brava (written under my pen name Susan Fox). [...]

The October 2012 issue of Locus Magazine, a specialty publication for the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry, features a lovely interview with author Kij Johnson, who is known for fantasy, but has a background in history. She makes the observation: “History looks a lot like fantasy.  Fabulous people, doing things that we don’t understand, [...]