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...
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...
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...
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...
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