My colleague and friend Dr. Shane J. Wood wrote a piece recently on Pride that reflects the state of my mind the last few years. I started this piece as a comment on his work and once it eclipsed 1,000 words, well… here we are. It seems to me part of the problem in our attempt to distinguish…

“What is an antagonist” originally sold to Writer’s Digest as “An Outline for Pantsers.” Teasing out the logic of an antagonist helps me understand how to outline both works I’m writing and works I’m trying to research or remember. We’re focusing on narrative works today, to be clear. Fiction, narrative poetry, memoir, film, etc. Though…

“What is a Poem” was Originally published in the Poet’s Market by Writer’s Digest Books under the title “Schematic for Sculpting Language.” As a young man, I complained I didn’t get poetry. The poetry world seemed broken in two: those who rhymed and those who didn’t. Rhymers chose their path either out of too much ignorance (“all I…

I have often said though I cannot directly recommend George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, if I discover you’ve read it, I’m happy to talk about it at length. Similarly, I personally will never watch the TV show Game of Thrones because I’m painfully aware, after how I spent my late teens, there are simply…

Photo by Reiseuhu on Unsplash Once upon a time there was a fantastical antediluvian epic about a world with three ages: an age of angels and their pre-edenic fall, an age of a sort of utopian garden and the fall of man, and the struggling of man before the coming of a flood or a…

Urgent: if since November you have replied to one of these newsletters via email, due to Substack’s default setting that only “paying subscribers” could reply, I did not receive your email. I’ve turned this default Substack feature off so everyone can respond to my emails. Test it out and reply to this right now! Hello…

I met Howard Tayler and Sandra Tayler at GenCon. I got the impression of lovely, joyful, and hilarious folks. There I asked them to do an interview about their creative relationship. We started right after GenCon and did this thing asynchronously through the fall up until shortly after Dragonsteel Nexus. We have many great interviews…

Share Remember: it’s going to be a packed house at the Of Gods and Globes III reading on Tuesday night, with a special surprise famous guest. RSVP for the NYC reading here or to invite all of your tri-state area friends. The old Theodore Sturgeon adage goes: A science fiction story is a story built…

Photo by Chris Bair on Unsplash Most come here first for the science fiction and weird anecdotes while others come here for my occasional prophetic frothing against ideologies that, for instance, support Nazis. Though I promise to get to the Nazis, I want to lead-in with what scandalizes most Evangelicals about their scifi and fantasy…

Originally sold to Forgotten Ground Regained and Alliteration, who have spearheaded the modern revival in alliterative poetry and catalogued all of my alliterative poems in their archive’s index. Photo by Dawn Casey on Unsplash Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Schools of minnows scrape in a whip like blue cookie…