"...The story of an astronaut as she struggles to adjust to life on Earth!" the radio ad promised. My car's dashboard briefly transformed into the glowing cockpit of a space shuttle. Space, psychology, and a female protagonist? That sounded like a movie I'd see (or a book I'd write). But when I looked up which... Continue Reading →
PitMad Post-Mortem: What Type of Book Pitch Got the Most Attention?
Confession: I usually avoid Twitter during PitMad. The quarterly Twitter "Pitch Party" invites writers to post 280-character manuscript pitches, which agents and editors can request with a 'like'. Twitter's eager writing community, amped up on fantasies of scoring a book deal, turn my feed into an endless scroll of self-promotion and supportive retweets. I'm not... Continue Reading →
Flash Fiction with #VSS365: June 2019
July was a hurricane, friends. In addition to the usual demands of a full-time job by day and wrestling with final revisions on Binary Chop by night, my month included: A whirlwind international business trip; Publication of the fourth Brave New Girls science fiction anthology, featuring my short story "Armed for the Future"; Big projects and... Continue Reading →
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Print Design: Three Book Formatting Flaws and How Indie Authors Can Avoid Them
My Sunday long runs often take me past the local Little Free Library (LFL), and I can never resist a peek inside the charming hutch. Two new additions the other weekend immediately caught my eye. Once was a phased-out library hardcover of Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which I immediately snatched... Continue Reading →
Flash Fiction with #VSS365: May 2019
Don't have time to read a novel? Or a novella? Or even a short story? Try some flash fiction! #VSS365 (Very Short Stories, 365 days a year) is a Twitter hashtag game for micro fiction. Each day, a new writing prompt challenges participants to craft a tweet-length story using the featured word. I've known about... Continue Reading →
A Game of Tomes: Two Dangerous Dichtotomies of Storytelling
Tonight the bloodstained curtain falls on Game of Thrones, the epic HBO series based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. In a fittingly meta twist, the final season’s harshest feud unfolded not between Starks and Lannisters, but viewers and writers. Denouncing television adapters David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as “incompetent”,... Continue Reading →