Guest Post: On Worldbuilding Cold Environments for Dan Koboldt’s Fact in Fantasy

So the recent daily blog experiment ended, but I have not been doing nothing - I was fortunate enough to be invited to do another guest blog post on Dan Koboldt's long running Science in SciFi/Fact in Fantasy blog series. This one is on cold environments. It's based on my experience working in Antarctica andContinue reading "Guest Post: On Worldbuilding Cold Environments for Dan Koboldt’s Fact in Fantasy"

Generating Durable Short Story Ideas

I know that for some it starts with a character. Stephen King, when writing novels, puts characters in situations and sees how they evolve. I don't know if he does short stories that way, but I imagine some people do. For me, it usually starts with an idea or a question, or a destination (ending).Continue reading "Generating Durable Short Story Ideas"

Getting the Most out of Books on Writing

I recently splurged on books, specifically books about the craft of writing. Excited by my new purchases, and already two chapters deep into one of them, and thoroughly enjoying it, I gushed to one of my writer friends. I was a little surprised to hear from them therefore that they too had read this self-sameContinue reading "Getting the Most out of Books on Writing"

Futurescapes: Workshopping the first 3000 Words

So on 5/2/23 I made a blog entry about the Futurescapes application and lead up to that workshop. Today I thought I would round out that with a post about my experience with the actual workshop. As a reminder I did the SFF 3000 word novel workshop. There are also KidLit, Horror, and longer 100Continue reading "Futurescapes: Workshopping the first 3000 Words"

Dream Agents, Editors, or Publishers

I think many of us would be lying if we did not say we had an idea of how we might want our writing career to go. I don't just mean Hugo's and Nebulas, though, why not? I mean down to what publisher you think matches you as your favorite author publishes with them, orContinue reading "Dream Agents, Editors, or Publishers"

Futurescapes: Application and Pre-workshop

So in March this year I did the futurescapes writing workshop. Before I did it I had searched blogs for people's experiences and I thought, given it had been of interest to me to get different people's takes, I would write about my experience with it. Now futurescapes does a number of different workshops, soContinue reading "Futurescapes: Application and Pre-workshop"

Developing a Writing Habit: Experiment – Increasing My Writing Output

When I started learning violin I found that it was hard to establish a practice habit, and without that, it was hard to make progress in my playing. In order to overcome that I made it a 'rule' that I did not have to practice violin 30 minutes or 60 minutes or 2 hours, orContinue reading "Developing a Writing Habit: Experiment – Increasing My Writing Output"

Robert A. Heinlein’s 5 Rules of Writing

Back in December, I wrote a blog reviewing and giving my take on Vonnegut's 8 rules of writing. Today, I thought I would cast a glance over Heinlein's 5 rules and, as before, add a couple of my own thoughts on each. As a caveat, the distinction of the rules from Vonnegut is that Vonnegut'sContinue reading "Robert A. Heinlein’s 5 Rules of Writing"