Rebranding: Cover and Title Upgrades for Black Ocean
Sometimes you reach a point where writing another book isn't going to sell more of the earlier ones. One more promotion, one more guest blog, or one more interview isn't going to kick your books from where they are to where you want them. Sometimes what you...
5 Worldbuilding Fouls (and How to Avoid Them)
If worldbuilding is the art of making someone believe in a world that doesn't exist (and it is), then anything that shakes that belief is a strike against your worldbuilding. Every reader is going to be different, but you never know how many strikes it will take...
Self-Editing for Continuity
One of the biggest mistakes a writer can make is a break in continuity. Immersion grinds to a halt, the reader does a double-take, and if you're lucky, they might keep reading (if your book is reviewed by Immerse or Die, it's a guaranteed strike). So how do you...
So You Want to Be a Writer
With the ever-increasing ease of self-publishing, more and more people are becoming writers. Most are doing it on the side of some other occupation, with no intention of ever taking on writing as a full-time career. But many are looking to cut loose from the corporate...
Why Science Fantasy Works
I hear the question come up every once in a while: "Can I write fantasy set in a sci-fi universe?" There seems to be some cognitive dissonance involved with the meeting of these two genres, and it comes down to preconceptions about what each really is. Essentially...
Medieval Stasis: Why is Fantasy Trapped in the Past
You're reading a story about a knight, a huntsman, and a wizard. They stumble across the ruins of a lost civilization, but something seems strange. That ancient culture seems to have had the same technology as the knight and his companions. Implication is that in the...
Series Mentality
Write one book, and you can feel confident in calling yourself an author. Write three, and you might make a career out of it yet. Write a dozen, interconnected and following a common thread of over-arching plot, and you just might be a fantasy author. What is it about...
Readers Are Rectangles; Writers Are Squares
All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Take that axiom from grade-school math class and replace "squares" with "writers" and "rectangles" with "readers." It holds just as true. There is no supplier-customer relationship that flows in a...
Worldbuilding: the Gift that Keeps on Taking
"I'm working on a story, but I'm stuck on the worldbuilding." I've heard some variant of this enough times that I felt the need to do something. Worldbuilding doesn't come first. It's like being unable to decide on the house you want to buy because you're stuck in the...
Worldbuilding: One Versus One Billion
There are over 7 billion people on Earth. Your story world may have more, it may have fewer, but unless you are writing a creation myth, you're talking very large numbers of people both alive and historical. Though few of them had any idea they were doing it, each was...