Point of View – Page 12 – J. Scott Coatsworth

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POINT OF VIEW: Just Another Manic (Covid) Monday

February 7, 2022 by scott

I’ve started to dread Mondays. After a quiet weekend, everyone wakes up Monday morning with one thing on their minds – fill Scott’s email box with inquiries, problems, announcements, and enough spam to make a Monty Python film. Add to that the unremitting dull, grinding sameness of life under lockdown – sleep, eat, rinse, repeat. And we do a LOT of rinsing, emptying the dishwasher seven times a day and wash enough clothes to string a line from here to Rome every week. Thank heaven I have a husband who does as much – and probably more – around the … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Navigating the Story

January 31, 2022January 31, 2022 by scott

I thought I’d have a little fun today and share a unique part of my writing process – navigating my worlds via maps – along with my hand-drawn draft version of the map for my WIP trilogy The Tharassas Cycle. For my sci-fi and sci-fantasy stories, maps are one of the first things I make. Growing up, I was entranced by maps of Middle Earth and Pern in particular (I may or may not own atlases for both worlds) and would refer back to them multiple times during my reading of each story, figuring out where my favorite characters were. … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: When it All Changes

January 24, 2022January 24, 2022 by scott

There are a few points in each person’s life where a chance decision changes the course of their future history, shifting everything to come onto a new path. We rarely see these in advance. They often only become clear in retrospect. I’ve had a few of these in my own life. The first these was my decision (with my mother’s blessing) to leave her home in Tucson to live with my father for a year in Rancho Cucamonga, California. I was sixteen at the time, and this one decision altered everything that was to come after, setting me on a … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know…

January 17, 2022January 17, 2022 by scott

Hey all… another fun one this week because I need a little levity in my life. 🙂 I thought I’d share a few things you probably don’t know about me! My First Publication Credit: To hear my About Me page tell it, my first published work was the short story “The Bear at the Bar,” in the A Taste of Honey antho edited by Anne Regan and B.G. Thomas (now available in my Spells & Stardust collection). But that’s not entirely true. My first publishing credit was actually twenty-six years earlier, in 1988, for the book Raising Each Other, a … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: What I’m Watching

January 10, 2022January 9, 2022 by scott

I need a break from writing about writing and writing about the sucky things in the world, so I thought I’d share some of my fave current spec fic TV shows! GhostsCBS/Paramount+Seasons: One We stumbled upon this comedy a couple months ago, and what a delight it is. The premise – ghosts haunt the living – is as old as the hills, but somehow the quirky cast – a ditzy hippie, a prim-and-proper 18th century housewife, a pants-less stockbroker, a Boy Scout troop leader, a native american guy who was… well, no spoilers, and a Viking warrior with an endearing … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Sci-Fi Hopes and Dreams

January 3, 2022January 3, 2022 by scott

The world is in a downward spiral. If covid doesn’t get us, climate change, the rise of the populist right, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse probably will. There is ample reason to be downright pessimistic about the future of the human race and the planet in general – who will come to save us? All prospects look dim. But as a sci-fi writer and someone dedicated to finding hope, being down on the future is not my job. So I thought I’d share a few future wishes that I’d like to see come true, regardless of the current … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: My Next Mountain

December 27, 2021December 26, 2021 by scott

Back in September, I paused to look down the mountain and see how far I’ve come since I started writing professionally in 2014. Now I’m looking forward to 2022, and thought I would share with you some of my hopes and plans for next year. New peaks await! First off, I’ll finally have some new novel-length work for y’all. After my 2019 releases of Ithani and The Shoreless Sea, 2020 was all about going indie, with rereleases of my Oberon and Ariadne Cycles, and about going wide – taking my work out to all vendors and to bookstores via Ingram … Read more

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AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: Catherine Lundoff

December 26, 2021 by scott

Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work. Today, Catherine Lundoff (she/her) is an award-winning writer, editor and publisher from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her books include Blood Moon, Silver Moon, Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories and Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic and as editor, Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space), as well as a number of published short stories in multiple genres. She is also the publisher at Queen of Swords Press, a small press … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Finding the Character Heart

December 20, 2021 by scott

One of the first criticisms I received as a newbie writer was that my characterization was a bit thin. Readers loved my immersive sci-fi world building and my intricate plots, but my early characters fell a bit flat. Ever since, I’ve been on a journey to learn how to delve deeper into the hearts of my characters, to make them really come alive on the page. I’ve made some good strides, but I still sometimes come up short. Before I start a new book, I do a few things to learn more about each of my primary characters before diving … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: In the Shadow of Giants

December 13, 2021 by scott

This week we lost another great writer. Anne Rice passed off this Earth, leaving behind an impressive legacy. While I was never a big Rice fan, I was still in awe of her storytelling ability, and how she almost single-handedly created the sexy vampire (and the gay one, too). Sadly, many spec fic writers I idolized as a kid are no longer with us – Asimov, Clarke, Tepper, Le Guin… Each one had their own recognizable voice, their own stories to tell, and an audience waiting eagerly for their next book. Asimov thrilled me with his Foundation novels, and his … Read more