I had a busy spring break. The weekend of April 18th my wife and I were in Seattle for Norwescon. If you haven’t been to Norwescon, you’ve got to go. It’s a fan con that focuses on SF and Fantasy. It’s well attended — I did a Thursday afternoon panel and a Sunday morning panel,...

I’ve been away from my blog since the start of the year, so I wanted to check in with an update. I’ll start with the big news, in case you missed it: PLANETSIDE was nominated for an Audie Award. This is a very big deal in the Audio Book world, where Planetside has been very...

So 2018. It’s been a long year for a lot of reasons, but today I’m just going to focus on writer things. Since I don’t want to bury the lede, I’ll start with the big one: On July 31st, my debut novel Planetside came out from Harper Voyager. It seemed like forever, waiting those last...

I’m going to read a lot of books in 2019. If history holds, it will be around 40 to 50. Some of that space will be saved for debuts and things I haven’t even heard of yet. But there are a few releases that are so significant that I set my calendar by them. I...

You get a lot of advice as an author. One of the most ubiquitous pieces is to not read reviews. It’s spoken so much that it’s almost accepted as gospel. Even when breaking it, authors will begin with ‘I know I shouldn’t read reviews…but…’ So here’s the thing. I read reviews. I probably don’t read...

I’ve never really cared for awards. Having spent a lot of time in the army, I certainly received my share of them. But I always associated them with standing in front of a group of people and having someone say good things about you, which I always found somewhat embarrassing. So I tried mostly to...

Another Pitch Wars is winding toward its announcement, and I had just a few things that I wanted to share in the hopes that someone will find them useful. First off, if you submitted your work to Dan and me, thank you. We really enjoyed it, and across the board this was our strongest batch...

Hi there. We’re back. If you haven’t seen the announcement, I’m mentoring for Pitch Wars again this year along with my long-time co-mentor Dan Koboldt. We gave it a lot of thought during the year, as we often do…believe it or not, we’re pretty deliberate guys. Pitch Wars this year has been in a time...

A long time ago, before PLANETSIDE, I wrote a fantasy novel. It was not a good book. I started querying it without ever having a critique partner or beta reader look at it. So…yeah. Don’t do that. For whatever reason, agents wanted to see it. I sent maybe 15 total queries out, and I got...

There is this time in the life of a debut author where the book is done. Copy edits finished, page proofs done, there’s finally nothing left to do. At that point, I had about four or five months left until publication. So what did I do? I mean obviously I obsessively checked my Amazon rank...