Fictions

“In the days before I got the bright idea to start writing novels, I ran that particular obstacle course. I dutifully ate the scorpions and walked the highwire, dredging up my childhood abuse and past relationships and anything else that seemed suitably dire to please a professor. It really makes for an alarming personality type: […]

Mary Sue is a term originating in fan fiction, for a phenomenon that has probably existed since a Cro-Magnon teenager scratched a stick figure single-handedly slaying mammoths on a cave wall. The above is a short list of stuff you can do with your characters to avoid the Mary Sue syndrome: that is, the creation

Gee, I hope so. In a discussion over at Torque Control about a review of the October/Nov 2006 issue of the Mag of SF/F, one commenter pointed out that, as writers/industry pros who knew the writers of these stories, we weren’t looking at the critiques the reviewer made objectively. We were concentrating on the critique

“Occupation” is turning out to be one of those stories that, like “Genderbending,” I didn’t realize anybody actually liked, read, or cared about until a year after it was published. Now Occupation’s on a “notable stories of 2006” list and reprinted in a Year’s Best SF. And, to be honest, of the three stories I

Plot should really be a very simple thing. Something bad happens to someone. Then things get worse. I’m pretty good at heaping on trouble, I’m just not sure that in the end, any of it makes any sense. Being a sort of “sit down and see what happens” writer, the whole process of discovery thing

I’ve been trying to get through Martha Wells’s City of Bones for a while now, mainly because it’s got a blasted-out desert setting with Old Ruines, bugs, mutants, and pirates, which sounded a lot like GW’s world to me, and I wanted to see how somebody else handled that sort of setting. And yea, you