I absolutely love the military, but I’m not blind to the challenges and limitations of the life either. Control Point was definitely a steam valve in some respects.

Voting for the 2011 Nebula Awards, the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the Andre Norton Award for Outstanding Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Book is now open to all SFWA Active and Lifetime Active members. Ballots may be cast from March 1 to March 30, 2012 11:59pm PDT. SFWA Active and […]

I’ve written too many stories and books now to not notice patterns of theme, image, character type, etc, emerge over and over. It can be a bit disconcerting to see ones own obsessions so clearly after a while. But the upside is that you can then take possession of those obsessions consciously, and mold them in ways that you might not have when you hadn’t realized they were there in the first place.

Basically, genre is a very useful guideline for grouping together novels that share certain characteristics, but I think it can also be a trap–what Ursula Le Guin and many others referred to as the ghetto. It tends to create books that are in dialogue with nothing else but genre: and, again, dialogue is a good thing, and a terrific way to create new literature; but it’s not the only one.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is proud to announce the nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards (presented 2012), the nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the nominees for the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book. Novel Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor) Embassytown, China […]

In THE LATE AMERICAN NOVEL: WRITERS ON THE FUTURE OF BOOKS, editors Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee have collected a number of new writers* talking about the future of books, and although the word has been interpreted quite differently by the different writers, there’s some insightful pieces included in the mix.

A little while back, I stumbled on a news story about Mitchell Gross, a Georgia man who was recently indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly luring a woman into investing millions of dollars in a phony company.

The research is simple. I pick up phone and call a physicist. Or whomever. I don’t trust myself to do my own research because I don’t have the background. I should mention that, across thirty years, I’ve made countless calls, often to strangers who just happened to be at the office, say, in the Lowell Observatory.

It seems clear that Luserke is active again–even if only sporadically. Given how few reminders of his perfidy survive on the Internet, I and Writer Beware feel it’s important for writers and artist to be aware of his history of financial and intellectual property theft.

In my opinion the best way to learn to write stories is to write them as well as you can and then take them apart again, and since I am still learning to write, I’m an admitted workshop junkie.