Currently, for my publisher, I produce a book every two weeks. No, these aren’t five-hundred page doorstopper novels. They are fantasy and science fiction written for a specific audience. They are novels none the less and churning them out quickly has gotten me attention. Mostly, writers and readers ask me…

To most people in the United States, reading Shakespeare is required reading. Furthermore, a vast majority would recognize the names even without opening the pages of the author’s work. The characters have transcended from the pages and they’ve become public domain in more ways than just the literary. Romeo and…

One of the least successful films from Bruce Willis is Hudson Hawk. People expected a story in the vein of Die Hard. Instead, they got a black comedy, heavy on cynicism and even self-deprecation. It didn’t help that the Studio had marketed it as an action film when they should…

There is a time and place for everything in your novel. Setting has two components – place and time. Together, they are considered a fundamental ingredient of fiction along with plot, character, theme, point-of-view, and style. The setting of a novel gives readers a mental picture of the world your…

I’ve spoken with many kids about Minecraft––no big surprise––but I’ve also spoken with them about writing their own stories. And a couple of things emerge as constant themes: Kids want to write their own stories. Kids don’t know how to write their own stories. So I put together some materials…

I’ve often heard publishing experts encourage writers to make their protagonist likable. We are supposed to make these Katniss and Frodo types who sacrifice everything for other people. Those are wonderful characters but there are other realities, ones where the protagonist is a coward. Where they make wrong decisions. Where…

This is my world, and I’m making it just the way I like. That statement would accurately describe my mindset when I created my book world for my first series. That world then spread through four more series. As authors, we know that creating worlds that readers can escape into,…