Blog post idea suggested by Karrin. I’ve gotten rejection letters that said “It’s a good story, but it just isn’t science fiction enough.” I think that might be where this question is coming from? How much is enough, then? Let me take the science out of the equation; how much Read more…
I was commenting to a fellow-writer that, in the slush piles I read, lately female main characters outnumber male main characters so much that the males stand out more and might have an unfair advantage because I find them refreshing and different. She lamented that we’ve “gone too far the Read more…
When I started writing fiction, and thought of my potential audience, I knew who I wanted to appeal to: Everyone. Well, okay, that’s impossible, but I had this idea there was a sort of mass of “normal” people out there who were dominant. I should write for them, the normals. Read more…
Playing sports taught me that if you don’t have confidence in your ability to do a thing, you won’t succeed at it. You have to believe you’ll catch the ball, bring the runner to the ground, or land your sword against your target. If you don’t believe you can do Read more…
When I was starting out as a short story writer –and for longer after I started than I am proud to admit– I thought my stories should grow organically as I wrote them, that they should be spontaneous things unexpected even to myself. Writing without a plan is so prevalent Read more…
So you’re writing hard science fiction. You’ve spent a week researching the thermal control systems on space stations for a scene where you need a time-dependent problem for the heroes to fix. The problem is, you’ve got like an 80-page dissertation on exactly what goes wrong and how to fix Read more…
I really, really love Halloween. As a kid who didn’t get to eat much candy the rest of the year, it was like… hedonism itself. I would panic and fuss about costumes, and made myself some pretty terrible ones. Yes, I was that teenager wearing face paint and an inner Read more…