UPDATE: Things went very well last night. A fun time had by all. The actors were cast perfectly, and given the answer distribution, I seem to have struck the right balance between an obvious villain and a completely obscure solution. Tonight I am going, with a bit of apprehension, to Read more…
What is with it with my fellow writers? Every few months I hear about some new neo-Luddite proposal that makes the stuffed suits at the RIAA look like they’re writing Harry Potter slash to bootleg Metallica MP3s. First it was Pixel-Stained Technopeasants, then it was royalties on used books. Now Read more…
Well I went through and polished up the draft of Heretics and it is now of with the editor so I can breathe a big sigh of relief and start work on my next project, the as-yet-unnamed book 2 of the Wolfbreed series for Bantam. So we’re going from apocalyptic Read more…
Remember when I said I might have good news about Valentine’s Night? Well despite a little tease, the people who were looking at the MS weren’t as into it we thought they were. (Too bad AT&T isn’t into publishing.) Anyway, no one’s comitted to the book yet, so if you’re Read more…
Remember when advertisements just offered the subliminal enticement of cheap dirty sex? The kind of ad that never bothered to ask your name, and was happy with just a quickie before it went off to the next consumer. No phone calls, no pillow talk, no strings attached. . .
AT&T is ruining all this by looking for a relationship:
So if you write a lot of SF/Fantasy (or historical fiction for that matter) you know that exposition is one of the heavier burdens your tale must bear. The whole point of speculative fiction is that the universe of the story is not “here”, and the author’s job is to get across what the reader needs to know to understand the story as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Delicate balancing act that, to one end lies opaque confusion and on the other like turgid boredom. The only real advice most beginners get about this is “no infodumps,” which, like the passive voice, will be red-flagged by a lot of first readers offering advice simply because it’s easy to identify.
So how does one provide background detail without being dry and boring? By using details in dramatic scenes. Consider the following :
You may have heard that Realms of Fantasy is marked for death right now. However, there is an on-line community attempting to save it. I joined up on Facebook, and here is a message from the people running the effort:
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Subject: Blog to Save Realms!!Dear Save Realms members,
Thank you for joining us. We’re off to a promising start with over 300 members in just five days. Now it’s time to up the ante. In order to gather enough support to save our beloved mag, we have to get the word out in a big way. That means blogging. (more…)
YouTube is a blessing for tired bloggers.
Here, watch this.
(via Weird Universe)
(more below the cut) (more…)
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. . . The country’s in a crisis, it is desperately urgent that we act now by passing sweeping legislation that massively expands government intrusions into ordinary citizen’s lives. We must pass it quickly, must not examine it too closely, and should anyone Read more…
Welcome to my second interview. Today I’m pestering another local Ohioan, Paul Melko. Paul has written over two dozen short stories and two novels. Singularity’s Ring, his first novel (Tor Books, February 2008) postulates a future of group-conscious humans, telling the tale of one such quintet learning to be a starship pilot. His collection, Ten Sigmas and Other Unliklihoods (Fairwood Press, March 2008) compiles his short science fiction, including the novella “The Walls of the Universe” which was nominated for the Sturgeon, Nebula, and Hugo Awards in 2007. This novella became the basis for his second novel, The Walls of the Universe (Tor Books, February 2009) which is the inspiration for this interview:
