A Blog Horde Interview with C.E. Martin
Welcome to the Amazing Stories BLOG HORDE INTERVIEWS! The ASM Blog Horde is a diverse and wonderful species. I have the privilege of talking with all of them, and I get to share those chats with […]
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Crossroads: Riding into Space – Westerns and Speculative Fiction
March is here, and that means it is time to move into a new Crossroads series. For some reason, March always brings to mind melting snow, spring’s inexorable creep across the plains, cold mountains withstanding […]
What Genre Are You Writing … And Marketing?
Our multiplex world of discerning consumers is getting used to having what they consume laid out clearly and categorized. Literature is no different. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, when Aristotle proclaimed in his […]
Characters: Song of Ice & Fire’s Tyrion Lannister
Tyrion Lannister has become a household name. Anyone who knows someone with an HBO subscription has heard of him. George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire has been making waves throughout the fantasy community […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Playing the Short Game: How to Sell Your Short Fiction (Part 7 in series)
Where to First?: How to choose short fiction markets Welcome back. This is the seventh in my weekly (more or less) series of posts on how to market and sell short fiction (I missed a […]
Mini-Review of Felicity Savage’s “Black Wedding”
It’s been so long since I’ve heard a “new voice” in horror writing that I’d forgotten what it feels like. Felicity Savage’s “Black Wedding” in her collection Black Wedding and Five More Funerals gave the […]
Crossroads: Is this a Kissing Book? SFF’s Relationship with Romance
Whenever I think of speculative fiction’s relationship to romance, I am always reminded of that scene in The Princess Bride where Fred Savage’s character interrupts his grandpa and – voice dripping with scorn – asks: […]
The Careful Writer: Some Notes on Composition
During my recent reread of Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style”, this little book yielded more good advice that I wish to share with you. “The shape of our language is not rigid,” they […]
Characters: Per Langstaff from Typhon’s Children
Oh, Toni Anzetti, or Ann Tonsor Zeddies, whichever. She’s magnificent in her creation of alien worlds. Not so magnificent in her characters. The Typhon series isn’t widely known, and I’ve never really met another who’s […]
Serial Fiction for Beginners
Serial fiction is old school and the best examples I can think of is probably comic strips, soap operas and the black and white episodes of Flash Gordon, Doctor Who and Lost in Space that […]
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 […]
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 […]
Writing Reviews – in My Opinion
Readers tend to gain most from reviews while writers tend to live more by opinion. That ugly thin line between the two is where fan compassion blurs with confusion.
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? […]
Ten Totally Illogical Science Fiction Premises
Over on my own blog I wrote about eight science fiction tropes of convenience, mainly about unlikely or impossible technology or assumptions that are made not because they make sense, but because they’re convenient for […]
Crossroads: Science Fiction Romance – A Niche Before Its Time?
Last week, we talked about paranormal romance and the ways in which it uses longstanding cultural archetypes (vampires, werewolves, etc.) to explore power, sexuality, and possibly even deeper existential themes. But speculative fiction is composed […]
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 […]
Characters: Ned Henry from To Say Nothing of the Dog
I’ve just finished reading To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. I’m a fan. There are far too few comedies within SF/F, and those that exist still find a way to take themselves […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Difference Between Thinking Like a Scientist and a Science Fiction Writer
I was in graduate school for astronomy when I started taking writing seriously. The first stories I wrote that were any good and started to sell tended to be fantasy or science fiction with horror […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Playing the Short Game: How to Sell Your Short Fiction (Part 6)
But How Do I Know It’s Ready?: Dealing with submission fear and arrogance Welcome back. This is the sixth in my weekly series of posts on how to market and sell short fiction. You can […]
About Author
Doug is an award-winning Canadian writer whose fiction has appeared in twenty-five languages and thirty countries. His works include The Wolf at the End of the World, Chimerascope, and Impossibilia.
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