She clutched the new pad of watercolor paper against her chest, forming her own shield, or perhaps holding her heart from bursting out of her to flop like a suffocating fish upon the ground. The world might end, they said, but all she wanted to do was paint. …

Sometimes the best world-building in genre fiction involves food and drink. I first noticed otherworldly food in stories such as Star Trek (Romulan ale), Star Wars (blue milk, and Yoda’s apparently not-great food on Dagobah), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (mushrooms, tea, and “beautiful soup” — eek), and the Oz books…

Science fiction collides with rapidly accelerated sci-tech breakthroughs that can and are pushing beyond what we thought possible in a short period of time. So how do we keep sci-fi several steps ahead? First off, make it weirder. Second, make it more intimate. It’s always the characters that matter most…

The cuckoo is more than a hooting bird that pops out of an ornate clock. It is a real bird, and it is a brood parasite. The cuckoo invades the nest of smaller species of birds, laying its own eggs so that those poor new bird parents now sit atop…

The shortest day and longest night have passed, and now we swing back toward the light. I’m going to talk about ways to celebrate winter’s ups and cope with its downs. Winter Is Hard Let’s get one thing out of the way first: winter is a time of adversity, and in our history…

The Turning of Leaves and Pages Autumn greets the northern hemisphere with golden trumpets and amber-hued afternoons. It is a time for taking stock of the year, and preparing for lower light and longer nights. Autumn is a wonderful time for writers, offering inspiration everywhere. Let’s dive in to the most colorful season. For Southern Hemisphere…

Recently, I sold my first book to a traditional publisher. This book is THE SHADOW GALAXY: A Collection of Stories and Poetry, to Trepidatio/JournalStone (arriving March 2023; preorders forthcoming). Prior to that, I had released a four-book space opera series, THE QUESTRISON SAGA, on my own, having paid for two…

On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke in Houston the words that would launch us to the Moon: “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they…

We’re in peak summertime. Just a month into astronomical summer, it’s time for the calendar ahead to start collapsing toward back-to-school routines, end-of-summer barbecues, and the like, even though autumn does not begin until September 22. Maybe you’ve made a summer bucket list, and checked everything off. Maybe you didn’t…