Worldbuilding: How Does Your World Tell Time?
Unless you write in a very strange setting, people are going to keep track of the passage of time. It's a fact of life that we take for granted, but there's a lot of history that goes into our own modern timekeeping system. January through June are all derived from...
2014 Reading Update (February)
Back at the end of 2013 I laid out a selection of books I intended to read in 2014. Having just finished the second of them, I thought it would be a good time for an update. The Name of the Wind I had always heard how beautifully written this book was, and it didn't...
How to Write a Character Who’s Wrong
One of the challenges of writing is that you have knowledge that your characters lack. When you write dialogue, you have to narrow your focus to what each character knows, and filter that knowledge through their personality to color it with their opinion. One of the...
Grey Characters: No Moral Absolutes
One of the comments I get about my books is that all the characters are grey. That means that you can't just plunk a black or white hat on them and say definitively whether they are good or evil. Go through the people in your life and try to list which ones are good...
7 Male Love Interests
(note: This is regarding male romantic interests for female characters. There are many potential relationship pairings, and to keep things simple, I'm examining them one type at a time) One of the first things to consider when you are considering creating a romantic...
Steampunk: the Engineer in the Writer
As I wind my way through the final stages of getting The Mad Tinker's Daughter ready to publish, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on my choice of setting. Continuing in my Twinborn Universe, which previously consisted of the worlds Veydrus (medieval) and...
7 Female Love Interests
Note: This is regarding female love interests for male characters. There are many potential relationship pairings, and to keep things simple, I'm examining them one type at a time. One of the first things to consider when you are considering creating a romantic...
Worldbuilding: Creating Fictional Cultures
When you create a world, you need to create its inhabitants. If you are writing in a historically accurate version of Earth, you have established cultures into which to fit those inhabitants. However, if you write any sort of speculative fiction, you have the...
New Year, New Look
It's 2014 now, and to go along with the change in calendar, I've updated the covers for the Twinborn Trilogy. With the success of the series, I thought it was time to reinvest in better cover layouts. I've always loved Duncan Long's artwork for the series, but it was...
Writers are Readers Too
It's the retrospective time of year, when we engage in rampant ruing and reminiscing, considering the sum total of the year about to drift away behind us. Though it is an arbitrary point, it's also the time when many of us look to make course corrections for the...