I remember the first time I saw “Star Wars” back in 1977. I was seven years old, but I still asked my mom to read the opening crawl for me, whispering it into my ear, because I was dyslexic and didn’t want to miss any of those words before...
A LOT of Fantasy stories have settings that are a version of feudal Europe, a remix of the more lurid aspects of the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, but I don’t identify much with that history. Maybe it’s my American mindset, but if I’m going to harken back to...
I dig pulp fiction. Not just the hard-boiled detective paperbacks of the 1950s, or even the pulp magazines like “Weird Tales,” which published Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft back in the day. I even love the old old school Victorian “chapbooks,” like “Springheeled Jack” and “Varney the Vampire.”...
In chapter one, Father Saren tells Cassian about the concept of “jessy,” which is the sylued word for “purpose.” Your jessy is that creative thing you do – even just privately – that makes you feel like you. It doesn’t have to be what you do for a living,...
There was a D&D game that we played in my dorm room at Emerson in 1989 that we never finished. About a year later I started up a new game with one of the same players, and he asked if he could keep the treasure and experience he’d gained...
I love talking about the stories and answering reader questions. There’s one question that my beta readers asked that has been cropping up again with Kindle readers, so let’s address it: “Why so many f-bombs?” Yes, one of our heroes, Timriel Jackson, reeeeally loves the word “fuck”. It is...
One of the criticisms that I received in the first draft of the manuscript was that the genders were imbalanced. While the characters See, Rachel and Zorai are strong women with their own goals and the agency to pursue them, they are still outnumbered by the male characters and,...
I asked the first beta readers of “The Elect Stories,” a handful of questions about themes that stood out to them. I expected to hear things like “good vs. evil” and hoped to hear things like “fate vs. free will,” because those themes are both genre standards and very...
For me, the hardest part of writing this book is talking about it now that it is written. I just wrote an entire novel so it may sound strange that I have trouble putting together a few more words on the subject, but that’s the truth. Part of me...
I recently joined GoodReads and according to them, I have hundreds of Facebooks friends over there. Stop in and sit a spell! I even posted the first scene from chapter one of “The Elect Stories” for your reading pleasure!
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