I melded my mind on the SF Signal blog again. My contribution re: underrated fantasy series: Ok, I’m going to cheat a little here, because there was once a time when if you were talking a fantasy series, you were not talking “novels.” From the pulps up through the 1970s, Read more…
A little bit of a reality check for those of us who write about SF futures, or just think about the future in general. This snazzy 21st Century lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to is based on an extremely long supply-chain. Think of the support required for an iPhone to exist. Read more…
It is done! The last volume of the Apotheosis Trilogy, Messiah, has just wrapped up at 103K words. (About 3000 words over my mark, which means the final revised draft is going to be even longer.) We have officially capped off the series I began back in 1993 with Forests Read more…
At least that’s the conclusion that Diana Gabaldon has come to. OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters. Of course, I have some different Read more…
And to wrap things up, the opening scene from Profiteer: For a hundred million years the two-kilometer-long Face had stared impassively up at the Martian sky. Dimitri Olmanov had only been visiting it regularly for the past century. The first time he had seen it, Dimitri had needed a pressure Read more…
Here we have the first part of Stranger Inside: Jimmy didn’t know how the fight started. He’d been standing in front of his locker and he remembered watching that asshole Frank Bradley pass by. In Jimmy’s mind there was an abrupt cut from that, directly to the sound of his Read more…
Now, here’s the opening passage from Wolfbreed. In the darkest woods in Burzenland, south of the Carpathian mountains, a knight of the Order of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans at Jerusalem, Brother Semyon von Kassel, ran as if he was in pursuit of the devil himself. Mud Read more…
Next up on my opening page series is from The Omega Game: Quaid Loman woke up— or at least became fully aware of his surroundings— sitting on the edge of an unfamiliar bed. His hands shook, sweat dripped down the back of his neck, and he needed a drink more Read more…
I recently started following a new group writer blog, Kill Zone, featuring a bunch of thriller writers. They’ve recently had a series of posts critiquing first pages submitted by their readers. I thought this a cool idea, and it inspired me to do my own series of posts on openings, Read more…