I want to talk to you about gardening, and some lessons I have learned in the weeds. I learned similar lessons doing power lifting, and I...

I have talked about reading fiction, reading nonfiction, reading genres, reading large and reading small. Today, I want to talk about...

This one is more complex than the others because the line for when readers get annoyed, or at least when I get annoyed is fuzzy. Very...

We are all alike. I’ve noted before the similarities between fantasy and science fiction, but I have started to read more broadly of...

Life is going to go wrong. Today, tomorrow or someday, someone is going to tell you that something didn’t go the way you wanted. You...

There are some pretty fine lines at times between plot armor, world building and genre, so before we dive into them, let's define plot...

I have talked before about reading books you loved as a child; the books that made us. I have talked about rereading books which I have...

I’m going to borrow a term that, to my understanding, derives its origins in video games. Nerf, or nerfing, is to reduce the power of a...

I was struck recently by an interaction with someone who was so unaccustomed to reading outside of their own genre, when they read a...

When we think of memorable events, we usually think about first times best times and worst times. How often do we give thought to last...

In this piece about how not to annoy your audience, I want to touch on a failure I have seen in only a few books, but when it happens, it...

Reading is good for you. Have you ever heard of the Mathew effect? “The Matthew effect,” is a term that refers to biblical verse Matthew...

I don’t know how many times a reader will give an author a chance, in general. I can’t find reliable statistics on it. I will tell you...

By the title, I don’t I mean to say that all science fiction has bad science. It doesn’t. But a lot of science fiction books do. By no...

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” - Thomas Edison What do you want? What are...

This post for villains is about a few smaller topics for your villain. Two that I want to address are the over-powered villain and the...

I have been considering returning to several books I enjoyed when I was very young. Not a child but not even a teenager. I am almost...

One of the more common kinds of villain in today’s literature compared to literature of days past, at least in fantasy and science...

I have heard it said, and generally agree, we cannot write what we do not know. Sometimes when we read novels the errors stand out to...

From time to time, I play Dungeons and Dragons. For people who are not familiar with the idea of a table top role-playing game, it is a...