Trying to manage a 600,000-word novel series definitely compelled me to check out a variety of writing tools. What I found was no one program did it all (despite the claims). I ended up patching together a lot of individual softwares to make a sort of Mega-Program. And this works well….just leave all the tabs […]
We’re told that writers should read constantly. I’ll admit I did this a lot more of this when I was a tween and teen. I struggle now to read voluminously, and I gravitate toward what I like best, rather than stretch myself and read things outside of my comfort zone. Regardless, Siana’s War (my novel series) […]
An article Leviathan author Scott Westerfield wrote about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (A Slayer Comes to Town) made me conscious of a prevalent theme in sci-fi and fantasy: who is “In the Know”, versus who is not. Of course, as Scott points out, we’ve all been seeing or reading this dynamic in multiple stories all […]
My brief answer is no. There is, however, a good reason for asking the question. Lovecraft is my all time favorite writer. To analyze Lovecraft’s influence on my unpublished fantasy trilogy Siana’s War, I’ll first address the question of Lovecraft’s influence on me. My fascination with Lovecraft began when I was a tween, and it […]
I went, as a sci fi/fantasy finalist, with no great expectations. I felt honored to be a finalist in the PNWA contest this year, so that was enough; anything else was just icing on that cake. My first conference was a great experience. I met interesting, kind and cool people without trying, got excellent advice, […]
I blogged in May: “On What Authority?” was I offering advice on the craft of writing? Since that blog I got the unexpected news that I am one of eight finalists in PNWA’s 2016 Contest in the science fiction/fantasy/paranormal category. This is a competitive contest for which PNWA overall (in all genres) received over a thousand entries. I mentioned before that […]
A majority of Siana’s War is in first person narrative. When you spend over a decade of your life and thousands of words writing about a character, especially in first person narrative, that character lives in your head all the time. Things that happened to her in your book feel like memories, not scenes out of a […]
When I was 11 or 12 I wrote a brief story about a girl named Eolia. I gave my short story the ponderous Latin name of Advent Ignaritatis. Eolia went in search of marvelous beauties and instead found a lethal kingdom of terrors. As a middle schooler I had a plethora of novel ideas, and […]