1
04, 2023
Fun features with Tom Foolery
The Curse of Er’Mah’Gerd is packed with a plethora of playful puns, so for 4/1, here’s the 4-1-1 on Tom Foolery’s favorites.
9
06, 2020
Make sure your main characters cast a shadow
For reasons beyond my understanding, my brain likes inventing personas—everything from wacky facades to keep small children entertained to personalities projected onto passersby. Everyone has a story, after all.
17
04, 2017
Some bad news about my brand
What is the digital equivalent of schizophrenia? Whatever it is, my website has it. More specifically, my brand suffers from it.
30
12, 2014
Should you care if readers care about your characters?
The more I think about it, the more a term like “character-oriented” seems superfluous. Characters are but one element of a story. Like setting and plot, they are essential ingredients of a story. But are they any more important than the rest?
22
08, 2013
Building a better book title
Titles represent anywhere from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of words. They have to be worthy of all that hard work you put into your short story, novella or novel. And they must be marketable.
24
07, 2013
And we shall call him…George
Any dabbler in sword-and-sorcery fantasy has faced the challenge of naming a monarch or two. Far be it for me to disparage other namers of kings.
5
06, 2013
What’s in a (brand) name?
When one first decides to become a novelist, many important questions come to mind: What kind of stories should I write? Should I use my real name or invent something better? Can I pull off the pipe and beard look?
25
09, 2012
Don’t let minor characters usurp your MS
At a recent Allied Authors of Wisconsin meeting, I was thrilled to receive unanimously positive feedback on a particular character in the chapter I read. The only problem is all that praise went to a pretty minor character who appears in just one scene in the entire novel and doesn’t even have a name.
15
05, 2012
Choosing the perfect name for your baby (or villain)
The Social Security Administration recently released the top baby names for 2011. I know this because I can’t NOT click on an article about baby names.
10
04, 2012
Friends and family of writers, beware
Joseph Epstein said, “Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies.” He was referring to minor counts of plagiarism—an apt description, a novel turn of phrase, a treatment of syntax that (with a minor tweak) we could pass off as our own brilliant invention. However, the thievery doesn’t end there.