Speculative Vision

I think the ratio of new SF to fantasy in the marketplace today is more a reflection of what readers are reading. Agents and publishers receive manuscripts by the millisecond across genres, and it's hard to believe that there's a shortage of SF writing being done in the modern day. There is some evi...

I've heard writing compared to a muscle. The more you flex it, the better you get at it. I've noticed that, if I take a break from writing for more than a few days, I feel really rusty and lack confidence when I try editing. I write almost everyday but do take breaks because I find you can overheat ...

The pun would have been "That's some Rhode trip Ariel has gone on..."

My high school physics teacher once told me that the best buzz comes from a combination of mountain dew and salt & vinegar chips. I've moved a lot more toward ice coffee these days. A good trick is to freeze coffee into ice cubes so that the ice doesn't dilute the coffee. I tried drinking white ...

Audioslave's "Like a Stone." I can't watch the music video though because it gives me headaches... so hypnotic.

Simon Pegg as Scotty... just brilliant. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie despite being a bit too young to have been hooked into the franchise without seeing it as vintage sci-fi. I think J.J. Abrams pulled some of his Lost shenanigans I don't particularly care for, but overall it's absolutely worth se...

I was just using Sherlock Holmes as an example, but point taken. I know while Doyle was still writing, in France Maurice Leblanc pitted Arsene Lupin against Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate Lupin's superior skills as both a detective and a thief. He was sued and forced to rename the Holmes character t...

From a quick look at your site, I'd say it needs the image reworked a bit. It kind of looks like a site I'd be directed to if the one I was trying to reach was no longer available... or if someone trolled a URL I thought would take me to a certain website. I've seen you post on a UK-based forum I vi...

Just simple "rinse, cycle, and repeat" to put it glibly. I envision the scene I want to write loosely, keeping in mind where I need to be in 5 pages or so. I then write, letting my characters take me where they will. That's rinse and cycle there... Then go back and edit. A lot of my writin...

Sometimes it can be a positive thing to kill the characters we're attached to. I mean, if we're so attached to them, then hopefully the reader will be too. I've always viewed a meaningful and tragic death as the greatest honor I can bestow upon a character. And if we're not attached to our character...

Some suggestions for revising I've picked up over the years: 1. Try to understand your characters' motivations and the attitudes that differentiate them. This includes minor characters. Add tension to your scenes based on these motivations and use dialogue to flesh out characters more than just adva...

"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change."

-Thomas Hardy