The Writing Life

In the spirit of honesty and transparency that’s often sorely lacking in the literary world, here’s what I’ve been paid for my novels for the last 7 years. Many of you don’t realize I’ve had writing contracts for 7 years! That’s because the first contract I ever signed was canceled. They paid it out anyway. […]

I completed all the chapters in my latest novel, EMPIRE ASCENDANT, last night. It’s the fourteenth book I’ve written, but just the fifth that will be published. There’s a reason I had to write so many trunked novels that will never see the light of day before I wrote ones that did: I don’t have

In the film Gattaca, a young man born with what its dystopian society considered “undesirable” genetic disadvantages manages to fleece the system and rise up through the ranks of its elite astronaut corps. When confronted by his brother about how he’d done it, the young man likens it to the swimming races they had as

About this time last year, GOD’S WAR, which had been out in the UK for a solid seven months, had sold just 300 copies there, and every single major publishing house had passed on THE MIRROR EMPIRE, the epic fantasy novel I thought was the most marketable thing I’d ever written. I was, to be blunt,

I was cleaning out some old files and papers this weekend, packing things up to get archived over at Northern Illinois University, and as one does when one goes through old photos and letters and emails, I reminisced about times past, about what could have been, about other lives led. I have been working with

I’m writing about a book a year right now. With a day job and freelancing work on top of my novel writing, that’s about all I can manage. Next year’s schedule has me writing at least one book in just eight months, which a lot of folks who write four or more books a year

I read a really spectacular Advance Reader Copy yesterday of a book called THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT (out Sept, 2015. I’ll talk more about it then). I was hooked from the first page and cried through the first 40 pages. It’s a tragedy in the traditional sense, like Madame Bovary or Macbeth (or Mass Effect