by Marie Croke Editor’s note: This piece is part of a rolling series, Writing from History, in which creators share professional insights related to the work of using historical elements in fictional prose. As speculative fiction authors, we twist and remake reality. Yet, when it comes to retelling events or using fiction to manipulate a […]
by Emily Jiang AN INTRODUCTION OF SORTS: To Boldly Go Where I Have Never Gone Before “We often fear what we do not understand. Our best defense is knowledge.” –Tuvok Over 15 years ago, when I enrolled in an MFA program for Creative Writing, I had no idea what social justice was. Around that time, […]
by John Dale Beety Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Playtesting Game Narratives series, curated by SFWA’s Game Writing Committee. In science fiction and fantasy (SFF) terms, game writing is exactly what it sounds like: writing for games. Calling oneself a game writer, however, is akin to declaring oneself a scientist. Divisions within game […]
by Jeff Reynolds A game we authors enjoy is “discuss how the short story market used to pay so well you could make a living from it.” When the topic appeared again recently, I wondered: Is there any truth to this view? Did writers of the past make a living selling nothing but short fiction? […]
M. J. Engh (26 January 1933 – 11 July 2024), also writing as Jane Beauclerk and Mary Jane Engh, was a librarian, scholar, teacher, editor and writer. She wrote short fiction, non-fiction, and speculative novels, including 1976’s Arslan, later released as A Wind from Bukhara. Engh was honored by SFWA in 2009 with the title […]
by Yoon Ha Lee When I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, I adored classical mythology, Arthurian mythology, the Cthulhu mythos. I was the weirdo who holed up in the library reading Tacitus, Plato, and Sylvia Plath for fun. I had ambitions of writing science fiction and fantasy. Yet the science fiction and […]
by Kanishk Tantia This essay is the fifth of eight in the Publishing Taught Me: A SFWA Anthology Project. The first story I ever wrote was unabashedly my own: written with unfiltered childlike enthusiasm, completed within a single draft and, to my eyes, perfect upon completion. Two donkeys killed each other because one was purple […]
by Austin Conrad As advice, “write what you know” is nearly as hackneyed as “show, don’t tell.” Both pieces of advice are essentially correct, but writers hear them so often we don’t really process either recommendation. This is doubly true in speculative fiction. After all, very few of us have ridden on the back of […]
By Samantha Garner When you think of video games, do you think of rich character development? Unfortunately, many people believe video game characters are either implausibly indestructible, or worse: boring. As a fan of fantasy and action role-playing video games, I’ve seen that belief transcended many times. As an SFF writer, I often find inspiration […]
By May Haddad Knot tying (“nodology” in Latin, “kompology” in Greek) is a time-honored skill honed in seafaring for millennia. Its history intertwines with maritime exploration, naval warfare, and the development of trade routes all over the world. Even as synthetic ropes replaced natural fibers, knots used by sailors centuries ago remain in wide use […]
In 19th-century York, England, a young woman inherits her father’s curiosity shop and all its ghostly secrets in a bewitching novel by the author of Salt & Broom. For lovers of Victorian ghost stories, yule folklore, and romantasy.
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam is the author of the novel Grim Root and the collection Where You Linger. Her short fiction has appeared in over 90 publications and has been nominated twice for the Nebula Award. By day, she writes for a mobile game.
