With a new month comes a new installment, and this month’s story is one we’ve been looking forward to sharing for a long time. It was consistently ranked as a stand-out by the beta readers, and is one of the author’s personal favorites, as well. “Reward, or, The Calling...
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...
I’ve started a new Author Profile on Good Reads! I’ve been on Good Reads for a while, though I honestly didn’t use it as much as would have liked. (I didn’t read as much as I would have liked, either.) Having the first installment of “The Elect Stories” published...
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’ve always thought it would be fun to publish serialized adventure stories like they did in the old pulp magazines. That’s how some of my favorite authors, like Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, first spun their yarns. We’re talkin’ old school. The idea of publishing...
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.”...
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