Disguised as a writer’s journey, a sabbatical from life, I am currently out of the country, avoiding commitment to the craft that brought me to this hidey-hole of an AirBnB. I am anchored here by my goal to retreat deliberately into the books I have written, but never edited, never published. The lurking question is…
Monsters are cool. They come from nightmares, so they have power over us that we don’t understand, and as transgressors who get away with whatever, they hold our attention. They’re cool. They’re often the subject of scary stories. Not always, though. They’re useful in a lot of sorts of stories. Monster Theory came out of…
Writing lessons come from lots of places. We steal from other disciplines constantly, using terms like “architecture” to talk about plots, or “fleshing out” to talk about giving more details in scenes. Some of those terms are so ingrained in our vocabulary that we seem to think of them as idiomatic rather than what they…
As an established author and the CEO of a medium-sized publishing house, I’m often asked what my advice is to a new author. My answer is always, “Get involved with a writing organization.” There are many facets to being part of a writing organization, and membership has a lot of perks. The Rocky Mountain Fiction…
Resilience may be one of the most underrated of characteristics; as human beings it seems that the world is increasingly asking us to up our resilience game. As human beings who also happen to be writers, resilience isn’t simply a nicety, it’s obligatory. Being a writer who lacks resilience is like being a car that…