I’ve spoken before about the difficulties of arranging certain tunes for harp, primarily centered around accidentals and key changes. What exactly does that mean?Between the notes of the musical scale lie sharps and flats. The easiest way t…
Some marketing advice will tell you to build a brand: a tagline, phrase, description of the type of books you write that will attract readers interested in them … a way of saying, “If you like this element, you’ll find it in all my work.” …
I mentioned earlier in the month that there are two romance stories in Surgeburnt, one in the past storyline, one in current events. It provides me a lot of opportunity as a writer to compare and contrast, though my narrator may be in denial abou…
Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold by Paula GuranMy rating: 4 of 5 starsThis is a broad and varied collection of fairy tale retellings and fairy tales inspired – a number of the stories within are not based on a specific narrative, but capture the fe…
On the Mac, text-to-speech is built into the operating system. This means you can highlight just about anything in most programs, right click, and go to Speech->Start Speaking and at once a flat Skynet robot will begin reading to you. As mechanical as the voices tend to be, I’ve found readback an indispensable part of my editing […]
Besides the onslaught of pollen and drowsy thoughts of evil trees, mid-to-late April also means that submissions to the Sword & Sorceress anthology open, and as every year, I’ve prepared stories for it. The anthology allows a maximum of two s…
A long time ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth …All right, not quite that long ago, but for the first few novels my ambitious childhood self wrote, when I started a new draft, I had my printout in my lap … and I typed, from the beginning, in a bra…
A recent post on The Guardian has been making some rounds in the writing community, and a few of the forums I frequent (including Chrons and Fantasy Faction). The short depressing tail from “anonymous” is stirring up frustration from some, and sympathy from others. It got me thinking about this thing we do called writing and […]
Hey folks, just a real quick update. I’ll be at Denver Starfest—April 21-23, 2017 at the Marriott and Hilton DTC Convention Hotels—selling books, signing books, and doing some awesome panels including: Brainstorming and Unblocking, Cyberpunk VS the SOA Genre, Politics, Religion and the Military – Worldbuilding Blocks, and Writing Supporting Casts and Creatures. It’s gonna be […]