Worldbuilding With Ships
An imagined world will only feel as large as you make it appear. By focusing on a limited part of the world, you make a world feel small and cramped. It's easy at times to forget that the Harry Potter series takes place on Earth, since all you see in the first book is...
Sci-Fi Time Capsule: Star Trek TOS “Arena”
This is the star of a new feature, Sci-Fi Time Capsule, a look back at a classic sci-fi episode. There will be spoilers, to say the least, but I plan to keep them below the image, so anyone who wants to check the episode out for the first time has an opportunity to...
Writing About Monsters: 3 Creatures for Your World
Speculative fiction is a stretching of the world into new shapes, an expansion of ideas to their logical (or illogical) conclusions. One of the many ways in which writers test those limits is by the inclusion of creatures that don't exist in our world. There are good...
Coincidences in Storytelling
One of the complaints about fiction is that so many times a plot is predicated on a number of coincidences. If things X, Y, and Z don't all happen to the same person, then there would be no story, and what are the chances of that? I've always found this a little...
New Series, New Workflow: Scrivener Ahoy!
I've wanted to try Scrivener for ages, but I've been writing a long-running series. It felt like a bad idea to make a major change to my workflow when I'd have to be converting years worth of work into a new format. So I stuck with Microsoft Word throughout the...
Manuscript Complete! Next Project
Tinker's Justice Well, I've just wrapped up the manuscript for Tinker's Justice, the final book in the Mad Tinker Chronicles. It still needs all the editing, cover artwork, and ebook formatting, so it's not ready to put in people's hands yet, but from my perspective,...
Amazon Pre-Orders for Self-Published Authors
Late last week I got the following email from Amazon: Hello, We're excited to announce that you can now make your new books available for pre-order in Kindle Stores worldwide. With a few quick and easy steps you can create a pre-order page up to 90 days in advance of...
Book Readers’ Ponzi Scheme
There's always someone telling you about a book they read, how great it is, and how you should read it too. Have you ever stopped to consider how that works? The person who gets you to read a book is ... ... more up-to-date than you. ... better read than you. ... just...
If Book Releases Were Like Software Releases
The software industry is a strange animal. Most software isn't considered done when it gets released; people expect there to be changes, improvements, and fixes for the inevitable bugs that weren't fixed (or often even found) before it got into the hands of users. Can...
Never Made it Out of the Shire (Pacing in Fantasy)
The Lord of the Rings is a seminal work of fantasy, but if it suffers from a fault, that fault would be pacing. For those who have read it, how long to you think the story spends in the Shire at the very beginning? Twenty pages? Fifty? My copy has this line on page...