Take Back Tomorrow is available as a free Kindle download today at Amazon.com. Eddie Royce thinks he’s got things all figured out. He’s managed to cheat the system and gotten himself published in the sci fi pulps by “borrowing” plots from Shakespeare. He doesn’t mind being a cheat and a plagiarist as long as no…
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When Jon Stewart interviewed Christopher Walken on The Daily Show recently, he asked Walken if he’d ever had to give one of those fake 555 phone numbers while acting in a film. Stewart’s point was that every time a character uses one of those numbers, it pulls viewers out of the movie. These aren’t real…
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Here’s something that seems to be an accepted truth about and among indie writers: The e-book and indie publishing movements are good for writers, providing countless authors the opportunity to get their material “out there” when it would have been rejected out of hand by traditional publishers and agents. Two underlying arguments: 1. The publishing…
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Last post, I talked a bit about character motivation. Think of this as Part 2, but with a twist. To recap, briefly, if we’re looking at a major character, readers need to know what motivates that character, what gets him or her going, what causes the character to risk life and limb or to dig…
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I’ve been a bit quiet for the last couple of weeks: Christmas stuff, a shift in my schedule, and trying to finish the first draft of my follow-up to Dead Man’s Hand are all taking time away from blogging (and other things I should be doing). I ran into a little problem about halfway through…
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All three of my books are available as free downloads today at Amazon.com. If you’ve read one, here’s your chance to grab the other two. Take Back Tomorrow: A time travel novel set in 1940s Los Angeles where a hack writer gets himself in a plot far more bizarre than anything he’s dreamed up in…
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My short story “The Boy, the Bug, and the Marked Man” is now available in the Winter 2013 issue of The Colored Lens, an online magazine devoted to examining “the real world through the lens of the imaginary.” The story has a steampunk feel to it, or maybe more accurately decopunk or dieselpunk. Whatever. It’s…
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As another round of student papers (the final set for this year) gets ready to come at me, I’m gearing up for looking at more careless mistakes: seemingly random uses of their, there, and they’re; sloppy pronoun references; uses of “now and days” or “now in days” instead of nowadays. Then there are the students…
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Over the years, a lot of authors and scholars far more knowledgeable (and opinionated) than me have tried to nail down science fiction, defining it in a variety of ways, sometimes in contrast to other genres like fantasy. Here are a few: John W. Campbell: “Fiction is simply dreams written out. Science fiction consists of…
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