Category: Uncategorized

World Building: Where Are We? Part II

So you have a strategy or two for locating the reader in time. You know whether and why you’re setting your surreal, speculative or dystopian novel in the past, present or future. And you’ve pinpointed the era, the decade, maybe…

Writing Who You Know

The novel discussed in this October, 2017, post was recently selected by Golden Antelope Press for publication this October, 2019. Instead of writing what you know, have you ever written who you know? My as yet unpublished novel, You Can…

Writing Life

Sit in front of your computer for hours. If you only write one word, that’s ok, you wrote one word. Subscribe to lots of literary magazines so that you can tell people that you subscribe to a lot of literary…

Writing Awe

In April I hiked through Zion National Park. I stood gape-mouthed, staring at the burnt orange, gold, and greens in the walls of a canyon so deep it made me dizzy. Layers of sedimentary rock rose up in swirling stripes…

The Importance of a Style Guide and Log

Here’s a comment my copyeditor, Jade Z. Scibilia, made about my last manuscript: “I laughed when you had Lynch mention the number of Johns in the police force (I recall we had to work on that in Idyll Threats). Buuuuut, we have…