Game of Thrones is the Best Worst Thing to Happen to Fantasy

Did you hear Game of Thrones season 8 came out on Sunday? If you say no, I’m going to either call you a liar or assume you live in a cabin in the woods without any internet because otherwise, I have no idea how you could escape it. Wait, wait. Hold on. I know you …

What Authors Can Learn from Box Office Bombs

It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a small city to make a movie. Directors, actors, producers, cameramen, extras, set designers, costume designers...when you go see Avengers Endgame in a couple of weeks and you’re sitting through the credits waiting for that post-credit scene, try to keep track of how many people …

Mortal Engines Review: Ideas are Worthless

So over the weekend I decided to watch Mortal Engines, a Peter Jackson adaptation of a book series by the same name written by Philip Reeves. If you’re not familiar with it (and if box office totals are anything to go by, you probably aren’t) it’s a young adult dystopian book series where the books …

What’s it Cost to Publish? A Breakdown of Expenses

If you do a quick Google search for ways to make money from home, one thing that will often come up is “write an ebook.” Technically it is correct. Writing an ebook is a way you can earn money. However, what those articles often ignore is that that writing a book is an expensive process, …

Plagiarism and You – How to Respond When You are Plagiarized

I pretty much exclusively write, and pay attention to, genre fiction. I’m a proud resident of Genretopia, and don’t look outside of my own little subset very often. However, today when I hopped on Twitter, I came across #copypastecris, and discovered that someone had committed the absolute worst crime possible for writers over in Romanceland. …

When Plot Holes Don’t Matter

The sheriff’s intervention comes under the heading of what we have discussed many times before: “Why don’t they go to the police?” I’ve always replied, “They don’t go to the police because it’s dull.” -Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock by Truffaut: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock This quote is from a 1965 interview of Alfred Hitchcock, …

The First Words – Some of the Best Opening Lines in Fiction

Have you ever read a book that hooked you completely from the very first sentence? On the recommendation of Amanda Cade, I started reading Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor, and I was absolutely drawn in from the opening line - which don’t worry, I’ll share in a moment. It grabbed me from the very …

Pasta Sauce and Books: Should you Write to Market?

The other night, I was talking to a few other authors in a discord channel we share. Someone linked this reddit post titled “How to make money ePublishing (without a bestseller)”. It had some really good advice in it, but that wasn’t what we talked about - we talked about one particular piece of advice …

Write What You Know: Breaking Down Common Writing Advice

Based on the response I got to the last time I decided to look into common writing advice that is often poorly explained, I decided it would be a good idea to make this an ongoing series I come back to every now and then. So far, we’ve looked at the suggestion of “just write” …

See Jane Run: The Difference Between Showing and Telling

In last week’s post, I mentioned that I would spend some time talking about how to Show instead of Tell. I often mention that I’m going to do articles in the future, but this particular one received an unprecedented number of requests, so I decided to run with it. Just like last week, where I …