I feel as if there's a constant tension in my creative process between the old and the new.As a writer, I'm restless:  always moving on to new worlds, new characters, new ideas.  I love short stories in part because it enables me to take a sn......

When I first started writing Scylla and Charybdis, I put together a soundtrack for it:  songs appropriate to the overall plot / theme, specific characters, relationships, and some choices for the gender elements that were just plain bratty (s......

When I say I enjoy creating things and being creative, I mean it in two ways.  The first is the standard usage:  I like the invention, putting together something out of nothing or the mental bits and bobs of everything.  The intellectual......

So…. (Muse:  You stole that post title from Futurama.) You know what they say:  if you are going to steal, steal from the best. So….  I think I have said before, I am members of a couple of writing groups.  About a year ago, one of those writer groups...

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...

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......