Having attended AtomaCon this weekend in Charleston, I have some thoughts to share about small SFF conventions that have writer’s tracks, and why they can be a good option for authors at a lot of different places in their development. Before I dive in, let me give the caveats. Yes, there are cons that are...

There are no universal rules in writing. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules. It’s just that you have to figure out the rules that work for you. These are my rules. They work for me. That doesn’t mean they’ll work for you. They are neither right nor wrong, because, as I said, there...

I was listening to the song “The Middle” the other day, as one does when one is trying to get motivated. Seriously, read the words: Hey, don’t write yourself off yetIt’s only in your head, you feel left outOr looked down on Just try your bestTry everything you canAnd don’t you worry what they tell...

This weekend I finished my first pass pages for PLANETSIDE. If you’re not publishing savvy, what that means is that I got a formatted copy of my book and went through it one last time to make any last changes. It was a pretty short turn, and as I was doing it I had some...

I always see people talking about that thing that ‘All Writers Must Do.’ I almost universally detest them, as there is almost nothing that’s set in stone that you must do to be a writer. But there’s one thing that I think comes close. It came to mind a few times in the last week or two...

A topic that I see come up a lot but that maybe doesn’t get enough attention is setting goals. After all, we talk about it all the time, right? Life goals. That’s the goal. But when asked to define what our goals are, it gets a little murkier. There are of course the standard goals. I’m...

Before you can tell somebody your story, you have to know it yourself. Recently I got the opportunity to help somebody with a synopsis of a book I hadn’t read, and as I did that, I figured some things out. So I wanted to share them. I boiled it down into three things you need...

I was having thoughts today about writing and self-doubt today, and I thought I’d share some of them. Is this because I’m trying to write a new book and it’s a flaming pile of poo and I hate it and it will never be as good as the last thing I wrote? Um….no? Here’s the...

I’m going to do something a little off here. I’m going to talk about somebody else’s book, but I’m going to talk about it in terms of how it affected me to work on it. It’s a little crass, I admit, but I’m not doing it to shine a spotlight on myself, to say ‘look...

Have you ever heard the dreaded phrase ‘I didn’t connect with your main character?’ No? Just me? In this short series of posts I’m going to rip into that phrase and look at some reasons *why* people don’t connect to your main character (MC). In my first post on the subject I talked about stakes,...