Increasingly, I’m asked by aspiring writers if I have any advice for getting started or “breaking in” to the writing business. I’m asked this often enough that I’m posting this here so that I can provide a more complete answer than I might otherwise have time for. First, I would be remiss if I didn’t…
Well, I did it. I survived two weeks at nearly 9,000 feet. I critiqued thirty-three stories and a quarter-million words. I helped plot three novels, including my own. I wrote a nearly-ready-for-publication draft of a short story in two days. I had dinner with George R.R. Martin and Steven Gould. I hiked an alpine trail…
Increasingly, I am asked by aspiring writers of various levels how they can improve their writing. This is a sufficiently common question, that warrants a sufficiently long answer, that I’ve decided to post the answer here for future reference. How to improve your writing: Join a critique group. No matter your skill level, the hardest…
I don’t often do these blog hops because they quickly take on the character of a chain letter, however, Gibson Michaels was kind enough to tag me, so I’ll dip my toes in the pool. If you’ve been following #MyWritingProcess, you know that this one is four little questions about the process of writing, and…
I was asked by to moderate “The ArmadilloCon Story Game” as part of ArmadilloCon 2023, a spec-fic literary convention in which at least two panels were concerned with AI, so I decided to employ AI to facilitate the Mad Lib style brainstorming of this classic con game: First, I asked ChatGPT for a selection of…
For months, I’ve been fairly quite. I lot has been going on. Cheifly, I’ve been working on an anthology for Baen Books. It’s been a LOT of work, far more than I’d anticipated, not just writing and reading slush and editing, but tracking down information and conducting interviews and looking up quotes for epigraphs, and…
Over the last few years, it’s come to the attention of researchers (and the rest of us) that some people have no “inner speech.” Inner speech, which has been called “inner monologue” by some, is the experience of hearing a voice in your head as you read and/or reason with yourself. Most people have inner…
Donald Trump did not dream up the Space Force. The Pentagon didn’t crib from StarFleet Command. Captain Picard’s communicator hails from the Second World War, and Kirk’s (best) recalls the Napoleonic Wars. Baen Books and Simon & Schuster bring you Tales of the United States Space Force, a unique collection of 24 stories and articles…
It’s more than disappointing that as I write this in 2022, more than a generation since I first worked as a software developer, nearly a century since the first programmable electronic computers, we are still wrestling with things as archane and crude as build files and what the Java community not-so-affectionately calls “dependency hell.” For…
While prepping for a recent “Pay it Forward Day” presentation, I stumbled on a useful analogy: submitting creative work for sale is a bit like dating. It’s tempting when a submission doesn’t work out, to think something like a teenager who just got ghosted by the hottest kid in the “in crowd”, to think “I…
