Constantin Stanislavski came uo with a theory of acting that I’m loosely going to describe as “become the character” – a method of connecting with the personality of the person you’re playing, and learning how to think and feel like they did. It’s also known as Method Acting, and taken to its extreme, it can … Read more
Writing the future is hard. We’re embedded in the present. We have all this amazing tech now, but most of it will be gone in fifty years, evolved into something new. Who could have predicted some of these things fifty years ago? Sci-fi writers, that’s who. It’s what we do, but it’s a lot harder … Read more
Last week, I talked about some writing successes during an otherwise bleak 2020. Today I’m turning my gaze ahead and pulling out my crystal ball (and my planner). Here are some things I am hoping for and preparing for in 2021. In January (1/10), I am rereleasing Between the Lines, my River City Chronicles prequel. … Read more
Sometimes we just get stuck. Writers gotta write, but life has a habit of getting in the way. Maybe a particular project has you stumped. Or maybe it’s a general sense of malaise or a bad review, or a book that didn’t sell like you hoped it would. As I write this, we’re at the … Read more
Growing up, I was an insatiable reader. Starting with the Lord of the Rings in third grade, I moved through the canons of Asimov, Clarke, Silverberg, McCaffrey, Heinlein and many more by the time I hit junior high. It wasn’t until I was in eighth grade and realized I had crushes on other boys in … Read more
Last January, I announced that I had a plan. Going all in on my agent search. Writing every morning from 5:30 to 7:00, to maximize my writer productivity. And putting together another novel. So here we are, almost at the end of 2020, and I figured it was time to look back and reassess. In … Read more
interregnum /ˌin(t)ərˈreɡnəm/ noun1) a period when normal government is suspended, especially between successive reigns or regimes.2) an interval or pause between two periods of office or other things. The world is holding its breath. As I sit here writing this, I find myself living through a number of nested interregnums. We’re still in the throes … Read more
For most of my life I considered myself a novel writer. Novels were my preferred reading length – I love getting lost in an epic story with lots of room to explore. Give me five-hundred pages, a thousand even, and let me roam in your world. And if it’s an epic series of 10+ books? … Read more
As a sci-fi author, I have written a number of times before about our responsibility to forecast the future, both to warn the world about what might be coming, and to share my hopes for what we might become. In these last few years, I have written four separate columns about the idea of hope … Read more
I just finished a new short story called “High Seven,” which takes place 150 years from now in a future where the world has devolved into a series of city-states that are holding on as best they can against the ravages of climate change. My view of the future has dimmed markedly over the last … Read more