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…
The September 7 publication date is six months away, but news like this will not wait. First, the title. When Linda and I teamed up for the anthology, our recent experiences with Colorado wildfires made the theme a no-brainer: Colorado’s Changing Climate—a deceptively flexible theme. Some members submitted climate change stories, while others interpreted “climate”…