The Belgariad was my gateway drug into fantasy fiction. As a pre-teen, I was already into sci-fi, but epic fantasy wasn’t something that interested me much. I owe finding it at all to a fortunate case of peer pressure: As middle school girls will, I navigated into a new group of friends, and one of them gave me a copy of […]
Father’s Day approaches, which naturally leads to thoughts of your own father (or, if you’re a dad, your children). Not all of these thoughts will be happy ones. Still, consider how lucky you are to live in our world, where your father is a retired salesman or an army vet, and not, say, the Dark Lord, or a serial […]
There is a common practice in romance novels that I think science fiction and fantasy authors would do well to steal. Subsequent books in a romance series are often told from the point of view of someone who was a side character in the previous novel. The first book sets up the group—say, men who […]
In Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Kate Wilhelm wrote, “Great fiction reveals that there is no such thing as a common, everyday uninteresting person. They are all interesting if you learn enough about them to discover who lives behind the facade.” So we asked members of the […]
