Seven years ago I started writing a book about dragons. These were not magical or mythical creatures, nor did the story take place on another world. This was science fiction: dragons created after rapid advances in DNA sequencing, genetic engineering, and synthetic biology. I imagined a world where we didn’t just create them, but modified […]
Putting the Fact in Fantasy Sold to Penguin Random House
About five years ago I started a blog series discussing the scientific/technical/medical aspects of science fiction and cultural/historical/world-building aspects of fantasy with input from real-world experts. Since that time, the Science in Sci-fi / Fact in Fantasy series has collected guest posts from more than a hundred professional contributors who were willing to share their […]
Querying Writers Should Know the Publishing Industry
It’s a well-known fact that while lots of people fancy the idea of becoming a published author, very few of them actually achieve that goal. The most common failure stage is almost certainly the first one: most people don’t actually write a book. That’s evident from my personal experience and also well-established from the statistics […]
Writer in Motion Week 4: More CP Revisions
It’s the fourth and final week of #WriterInMotion — a month-long effort to write/edit a 1,000 word story while sharing the process on my blog. This week I had the pleasure of working with two more critique partners. Logistics were more challenging this week, as I was out in the country for some end-of-summer-break, socially […]
Writer in Motion Week 3: CP Revision Draft
I’m writing and editing a 1,000 word science fiction story this month as part of Writer in Motion. It’s been a lot of fun; you can see my first draft and second, self-edited draft in my previous posts. This week, we’re revising our stories based on feedback from two critique partners. I was delighted to […]
