I am going to be an internationally renowned physicist, author, biologist, powerlifting champion, and gardener with a flair for airplane...

I am going to ask you to sacrifice a cup of coffee, or at least the price of one. I would love it if you sacrificed the price of your next movie out, DVD purchase, or trip to KFC, and instead spent the same money in a diffrent way to save others. I’m talking, in this instance, about science fiction and fantasy magazines.   Fantasy and science fiction magazines are in decline—digitally, in print, and across the English-speaking world. (Perhaps broader, I don’t know.) While som

I would like you to look at the page structure of a fantasy novel below. An early segment from Clash of Kings We have a familiarity with...

I want to talk to you for a moment about my two cats. Felix is about two years old. He is incredibly athletic, with an easy five-foot...

Let’s talk about my garden for a moment: This garden is a touch overgrown... The garden stretched out like an open wound, raw and gaping...

A few Daffodils... Just as the end of the gardening year is a good time to take stock, so too is the beginning of the gardening year. For...

This is often called line editing, but line editing has multiple parts. Because I am an architectural writer and lean more toward the...

Their time has come... You’ve written your book, and now it’s time to start your edits. Step one: read your book again like a reader....

If you planted a garden in a day, you wouldn’t know if you were successful for a year or more. If you wrote a novel today, and it was the...

Worth their weight in black pepper...or gold... I recently finished a novel and passed it on to three beta readers. One loved it and had...

Not all editing is created equal. Many famed authors have said that the first draft is for the writer, and everything else comes later....

Plants sleep, after a fashion. The sun sits too low in the sky, the ground grows hard and cold, and snow blankets bare twigs that...

Did you know that sea turtles can detect magnetic fields with such precision that they can steer themselves back to their beach of birth...

Start with your tagline

Most of us have heard the phrase physician, heal thyself. When it comes to editing and writing, people will say, “Work on your own book, get good at your own work, then worry about other people.” I disagree. Editing other people’s books, short stories, poems—anything—is incredibly useful for any aspiring writer. It gives us so much in return. When we read other people’s work, we feel like masters of the craft. Our confidence might soar because we know exactly why this works,

Courage is a decision.

I want to talk to you today about an exceptional man. I don’t know him; I don’t know how much truth there is behind his words or how much...

“You’re one in a million.” We all know the phrase. Technically speaking, we are all one in a million. No one else has ever walked your...

Everything that we take for granted today was someone else’s dream yesterday. Plumbing. Electricity. Internet. Cars. Lattes. Indoor...

My story is under attack. My story is being broken. They hate it. They hate me. Nobody understands what I am trying to create. Why don’t...