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 [...]

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 [...]

Hello & Happy April Fool’s Day! My April Fools’ Day started like any other day for me. That is, until the first five hours of my work efforts disappeared. Didn’t back up, didn’t materialize any where. Just gone. Poof. Vanished into thin air. It’s happened to me before, and it will happen again. All writers [...]