November 24, 2009

Mike Stellar and The Compound Winner!

Light month on the contest entries! Thank you to those who entered!
The winner of K. A. Holt’s Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel and S. A. Bodeen’s The Compound is
Teri!

Congrats, Teri!
Email me your mailing info offline through my website.

PJ Hoover has already read The Compound and has Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel on its way to [...]

November 16, 2009

NEW CONTEST: Time Traveling Turkey Day?

November isn’t rife with unusual holidays like many of the other months. We could create Time Traveling Turkey Day. Or we could have done another Friday the 13th contest, but seeing as how that was last week, it simply won’t do. So this month for our contest, we’ll go straight up with our Thanksgiving Contest!
This [...]

November 1, 2009

Spec books I’m looking forward to

My most recent updating in Goodreads got me thinking about speculative fiction books I’m looking forward to. Since it is a bit of a broad definition, I’ll list some that I can’t wait for and what the main reason I’m looking forward to them is.
My number one book for 2010 I’m looking forward to is [...]

October 8, 2009

Changing the World

I read recently that characters should change a world. Sure, I’ve read tons of time that, yes, characters should be proactive. They should take action. They should make decisions and do things. But for some reason the description of them changing the world really left an impact with me. As if they are solely responsible [...]

September 28, 2009

Multiple Antagonists

While getting feedback on one of my manuscripts in the past, a critiquer made the comment that in a middle grade novel there is only room for one antagonist. Yes, you guessed it. My novel, at the time, had two. They were not opposed to each other in their motivations, but they did have distinct [...]

September 22, 2009

Register your book for banning

Banned Book week is coming up September 26th-October 3rd, 2009.
Tons of books are banned these days. ALA registered 513 books banned last year and noted 70-80% are never reported on top of that. Books are banned for sexuality, violence, profanity, and slang. They are banned for offensive portrayals of religious or racial groups or positive [...]

September 10, 2009

And What About Steampunk?

It’s not brand new, but as of late, I’ve been hearing more and more about it.
What is Steampunk, though, you might ask. People tried to tell me, but I had to google to finally get the right picture in my mind.
From Wikipedia (the most reliable online source for this kind of thing, right?)…
Steampunk is:
a sub-genre [...]

August 18, 2009

Theories of Deep Space—How far can we stretch?

Faster than light! Sign me up!

Light Speed
Warp Drive
Teleportation
Hyperspace
Wormholes

The great thing about speculative fiction is it has no bounds. We can travel millions of light years across the galaxy. We can jump so far in the future and out in space that Earth is nothing more than mythology (I’m thinking Foundation here and also Orson Scott [...]

July 30, 2009

Sequelitis

So this October I have a sequel coming out. Writing a sequel has been a fun, if eye-opening, experience for me. I laugh when I think about some of the incarnations of my sequel. It’s seen some bad, bad days. I like to hope in the time since its first draft, it’s improved.
I’ll try to [...]

July 25, 2009

The “MOON DAY” Giveaway Winner!

So here it is!
The moment you’ve all been waiting for!
The winner of the “MOON DAY” Giveaway!
But first, THANK YOU so much to everyone who played. I loved reading all the awesome responses. It’s just so cool. I guess we can look forward to next year’s total solar eclipse at Easter Island now.
Anyway, without further hesitation, [...]