In all my various jobs, I have always had deadlines of one sort or another, and of course at university I had monthly deadlines. Since I am not a traditionally published writer, I have never had to deal with external deadlines when it comes to my writing. To get anything done, therefore, I have to [...]
Deadlines? Deadlines? What are deadlines?
New Releases Reviews: Not Much Luck
Here are the rest of my recent Kindle samples. Not as much luck this time with adding books to my to-be-read pile, but I found one worth reading, which is enough for now… Remember, these are just my first impression opinions. I’m not saying any one book is bad – just that it doesn’t grab [...]
My Early Influences #2: Patrica A. McKillip
Although there are many authors from the 80s who I would love to be compared to, (like Charles de Lint, Patricia C. Wrede, Sherri S. Tepper, or anyone from the Fourthe Street Fantasy group), there is one author whose early books stand out as the pinnacle of “I wish I could have written that.” Patricia [...]
New Releases Reviews: Looking for My Next Read
Shortly after getting my Kindle, I would download samples of a bunch of new releases and do a quick read of the first few pages to decide if I wanted to buy the book or not. Although I wanted to like every book I sample, the reality is that I have limited time and money [...]
My Current Influences #1: Nicola Roberts
I’m generally a calm guy, which is good when it comes to dealing with problems in life, but when it comes to my writing, calm equals boring far too often. I often don’t up the pace enough in my stories unless I have something driving me, and like many authors, I turn to music for [...]
My Early Influences #1: The Tredana series by Joyce Ballou Gregorian
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been procrastinating a lot recently and one of my favorite time-wasters has been the discovery of the website SciFan.com, which has over 78,000 science fiction and fantasy books listed in a database. Unlike other book sites, SciFan offers a by-year-published browsing feature. I’ve had a lot of fun going through [...]
Procrastination
I’m a part of an on-going blog tour called the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour. Each month, we share a single topic and readers get to see more than twenty different spins on the same topic. This month, we’re talking about procrastination, which used to be a favorite topic of mine. As some of you might know, [...]
Guest Fiction: An Emma Newman Split Worlds Story
This is the fourteenth tale in a year and a day of weekly short stories that British author Emma Newman has set in The Split Worlds and was inspired by a prompt from me. If you would like Emma to read it to you instead, you can listen here. You can find links to all the other stories, [...]
Why I Write Fantasy
One of my favorite authors, Patricia C. Wrede, has recently re-released her early books as ebooks and as a part of the marketing campaign her new e-publishers put together a video of the author talking about writing. I can only say “ditto”…
Are You My Reader?
If you are, you’re someone who wants to get to know yourself — and the rest of the world — better. You love getting inside the head of other people and figuring them out. You understand the importance of choice and look for ways to increase your understanding of the consequences of your own choices. [...]