I grew up enjoying Westerns. I’ve always had a particular fondness for Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” films, even before I could properly articulate why. Despite the bad dubbing, the anachronistic production design, and the all-over-the-shop acting, something about those films has always felt more “true” to me...
If nothing else, this month’s cover art – a dark portrait lit with unnatural neon colors, our standard background “frame” warped and washed in black and gray – should tip you off that there are changes afoot in the world of the Elect. From the first page of this...
One of the cool benefits of publishing via Amazon Kindle is that the work can be revised or corrected even after it has moved from our virtual shelf to yours. If we spot typos or grammatical errors, a corrected draft can be uploaded that will be swapped out for...
Plato wrote about the concept of “telos” as being a “perfect paradigm” or “ultimate version” of whatever was being discussed. His student Aristotle and his contemporaries expanded upon the idea, saying that everything and everyone has its own form of telos to achieve, that being their own “purpose” in...
Some readers expressed surprise when “The Elect Stories” made a leap of twenty years from chapter one to chapter two. While the absence of the first chapter’s heroes, Palm and Timriel, is an obvious change, a more subtle one is the shift to present tense. The swashbuckling story of...
Fantasy stories transport us to other worlds with the power of words. It is the nature of the genre that some of those words will be wholly new inventions of the author. We writers aren’t trying to be difficult, and (most of us) don’t enjoy forcing you to memorize...
I like to listen to music when I write. I think I may have started the habit when my kids were young and the space inside of a pair of headphones was the only solitude I was going to find. Over time, music has become a trigger. The right...
I am fascinated by story structure. That’s why I’ve created my own “day job” as an editor and development consultant, where I can spend most of my work life thinking about and discussing narrative structure. I totally get how this stuff is boring to other people, but I enjoy...
A quick search around Amazon will reveal that “the fae” are enjoying a bit of a moment. While the cover art suggests that many of these new stories about fairy folk are Twilight-style supernatural romances, the lore behind fairies, faeries or fae is far older and more complicated than...
Another reason why I drew inspiration from the Enlightenment Era, particularly the years 1780 – 1800, is because the story is about the conflict between tradition and reinvention, and few periods of history are better examples of that. The rapidly changing fashion of the late 18th century is aesthetically...
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