The Writing Life

I’m often asked why I bother posting “I won’t be on the internet for awhile” posts on the internet, and it’s because these posts aren’t really for you all, they are to remind ME every time I’m tempted to come back that I told YOU that I had WORK to do. In addition to my […]

I spend a lot of time talking craft and word count and publishing as a business online, and I do my fair share of exhausted-tweeting, like last night when I sat up until 10:30 signing bookplates for newsletter subscribers. Or on Saturday when I squeezed out my 5,000 words for the week in one go,

I’ve talked before about how I don’t write every day. This idea blows the minds of some folks who follow me on Twitter during the long marches right up before deadline, when I’m updating them with insane word counts while weeping into my whisky and mourning extravagant character deaths. But the reason I binge write

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