I recently volunteered to be a first-round reader at a fiction magazine. A “slush reader.” I think referring to the mountain of submitted stories as “the slush” started when paper submissions were slipped through the transoms of publishing offices, resulting Read more
I’ve got a lot of balls in the air right now. On Saturday, May 19th, I will be at the SFWA Nebula Conference in Pittsburgh, in particular I’ll be at the Clarion All Class Meetup from 3-6pm 😉 On Monday, Read more
This will be cross-posted to Analog’s new blog site. My story in the current issue of Analog has the longest history of any short story I’ve written, and is, like its protagonist, a strange creature of thrown together parts. I’ve Read more
PLOT is not ACTION. It can be easy to confuse the two. I sure have. I’ve heard great and award-winning authors summarize their view of plot as, “The stuff that happens.” Well, yes… a successful plot is the stuff that Read more
“When do you stop revising?” A friend asked me recently. “You can stop?” was my initial response, but the truth is more nuanced than that. (And besides, that answer was Not Helpful.) At some point in my writing career – Read more
So once upon a time I thought I’d write about story shapes – the idea that stories can be thought of in these vague archetypical forms, and that will help with writing them. I jumped right in with “The Caper” Read more
When I was still unpublished, I spent a lot of time worrying about My First Line and Hooking The Reader. If my very first line didn’t grab the reader by the throat and make them incapable of doing anything other Read more