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...

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...

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...

One thing we don’t always talk about in the writing community is money (Though I’ve seen a few authors address it.) I thought I’d do my part to share some information on the process, along with passing along some specific numbers. I want to say up front that I’m sure all contracts are different. I’ll...

I saw a great twitter post by an agent this week about negotiating contracts, and it got me thinking about what agents do. I think there are a ton of great posts from agents out there on the subject, but I wanted to hit it from a writer perspective. I might not know what happens...

It’s been just about a year since we agreed to a deal with Harper Voyager to publish my debut novel, PLANETSIDE. A year seemed like a good time to talk about what happened after the celebration stopped. I think we focus so much on getting that deal that sometimes we don’t think about what comes...

Welcome to my first ever episode of Mike talks about SFF you may not have read. In this space I’m going to discuss some possibly lesser known books that for whatever reason haven’t gotten the attention they deserved. I won’t be talking about the newest Scalzi book, or Kameron Hurley’s latest. Yes, I’ve read them....