Edgar Allan Poe – Part 2

Few poems have been quoted, misquoted and satirized as much as Poe’s The Raven, and in truth it’s style and gothic theme are easy to satirize.   Poe’s most ardent wish was to be known as […]

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That Next Project

So you’ve finally finished writing your book. The manuscript has been edited more times than you care to remember and now you can just sit back and wait for the reviews and fan mail to […]

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An Interview with Stephanie Osborne

Adam Gaffen for Amazing Stories: Welcome!  It seems appropriate that there’s a science fiction author who is a rocket scientist; how did one lead to the other? Stephanie Osborne: Thank you! And thank you for […]

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Vital Editing

Once you have written something with a great hook, a beginning, middle, and satisfactory ending… you don’t have those? Well, that’s a blog for a different day! The next task is to edit what you […]

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Edit Edit Edit Edit — Are We Done Yet?

So, your manuscript keeps getting rejected, again and again. You’ve researched the market and submitted it to only those houses that publish your genre. You’ve consulted their guidelines for word count. You may even have […]

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How to Begin a Short Story

Maybe I’m just impatient, but I’ll generally stop reading a short story if the first two paragraphs don’t answer the following questions: Who is this story about? (Character) Why should I care about that character? […]

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More From the In Box

From Randy Dotinga via Facebook: Hello fellow sci-fi fans! If you’re a current or aspiring sci-fi writer, listen up. The annual writers conference of the ASJA, North America’s leading association of freelance writers and non-fiction […]

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Zoe Duff – Independent Publisher

What do you do when you’re writing in multiple genres and don’t quite fit into contemporary classifications? If you’re Zoe Duff, you start up an independent publishing house and learn the process of printing and […]

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Writing With Children

There were army men in the bathtub when I stepped into it this morning. Why do we never read about things like this in the far-future worlds of space opera, or the misty-eyed sagas of […]

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What Science Fiction Lacks

Good criticism and brave critics. That’s what the science fiction field lacks. For decades now, most book reviews with in the field rarely give honest assessments of a given works strengths and weaknesses. Read any […]

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Why Piracy is Never Okay

Since the bloggers on this site are mostly authors who no doubt believe in the concept of copyright (because presumably they’d like to get paid for their work), I thought I’d go through the arguments […]

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Just Write

The key to self publishing is to write. Often, this can be a difficult feat, much harder than it first sounds. For instance, I have four children. Fitting any writing in around them can be […]

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Rejection Slip Scrapbook

We all deal with rejection in our own way. To some, anything that feels like the slap on the hand they got from touching something forbidden as a child can discourage them from trying again, […]

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A Way To End Ebook Piracy?

I recently had my most-recent non-fiction book pop up on an illegal file sharing site.  Within a week, it had gotten 500 downloads. Needless to say, I was p*ssed off. The site (which I won’t […]

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