Category: Writing
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How To Authorify, Part 3
February 2014 was a revelation to me. Up until A Darkling Sea came out, I still had the quaint belief that the author's job was to write stuff and the publishers took care of selling it. I forgot that one of the most effective selling tools in the publisher's kit is the author. During February…
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It Gets Real
Recently I've been rereading some classic detective stories — some of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, some of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, and some of Raymond Chandler's works. It occurred to me that mystery stories, and the historical development of the genre, had an interesting parallel with science fiction. Both science…
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How to Authorify, Part 2
A Darkling Sea sat on my disk drive until 2012, when two things happened. The first was that David Hartwell invited me to his Hard SF Minicon in Westport, New York — chronicled here. That was a very entertaining weekend and gave me the opportunity to meet Gregory Benford in person. Mr. Benford apparently enjoyed…
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How To Authorify, Part 1
I may have mentioned that I have a book coming out. Some readers may be interested in finding out how one gets to the point of having a book coming out. For aspiring writers who want to know how it works, or interested bystanders, here's what happened. I started to write A Darkling Sea around 1998,…
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Season of the Witch
It's Halloween today, and I notice that Google has chosen to celebrate the day with a "Google Doodle" of a witch busy at her cauldron. I've written about Halloween witches elsewhere, but one of the links off the Google page (this one) reminded me of something I've come to detest in modern supernatural fiction. In…
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Welcome to the Twenty-First Century
I got a surprise package in the mail the other day: my contributor copy of Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, an anthology edited by David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It's a collection of stories by science fiction writers whose careers have taken off since the start of the new century, and the list of authors…
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The All-Seeing Eye
I recently attended another stimulating meeting of the mighty Cambridge SF Workshop, and we wound up spending a lot of time talking about the use of the "omniscient" narrative voice in the work under discussion. For those who slept through high-school English, a work has an omniscient narrator when the narrative voice describes things which…
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Default Futures
One of the comments on my last 'blog post, by the inimitable Alexander Jablokow, brings up the idea of what he describes as "consensus futurelike places" as story settings, which may or may not have anything to do with the author's actual vision of what the future will look like. This is not a new…
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Predicting The Future
I read this guest post on Sarah Hoyt's 'blog, and it got me to thinking. As Mr. Begley points out, one of the constant refrains of our time is how "the future" that we're living in doesn't look like "the future" as depicted in mid-20th Century science fiction and popular science articles. We don't have…
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Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 4)
Well, it's done. I beefed it up by nearly a third and sent it out to my agent. I hope it finds a home. One thing which expanding Corsair has allowed me to do is to give the minor characters more spotlight time. One of them — Anne Rogers — got promoted from a secondary…
The Cambias Digression 