Point of View

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing in the Margins

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Growing up, I was an insatiable reader. Starting with the Lord of the Rings in third grade, I moved through the canons of Asimov, Clarke, Silverberg, McCaffrey, Heinlein and many more by the time I hit junior high. It wasn’t until I was in eighth grade and realized I had crushes on other boys in my class that I noticed the lack of diversity in speculative fiction. And it wasn’t until much later – after I came out at twenty-three – that I started thinking about actually writing my own queer characters. My very first one was a gay, winged … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: My Squad

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Writing is a solitary prospect. We sit in our little writer caves and come up with words that evoke worlds. It’s a lonely pursuit, but one we do gladly. Many of us writers are introverts. That means we get energy from being alone, as opposed to extroverts, who get energy from being among other people. I’ve always thought of myself as an extroverted introvert. When I was young, I was scared of people. I remember hiding behind my mom’s pantsuit when we met somebody new, scared to see them face-to-face. In high school I forced myself to become more outgoing. … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Following the Plan

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Last January, I announced that I had a plan. Going all in on my agent search. Writing every morning from 5:30 to 7:00, to maximize my writer productivity. And putting together another novel. So here we are, almost at the end of 2020, and I figured it was time to look back and reassess. In March, COVID-19 took us by storm, and nothing has been the same since. But I stuck to my plan, through the lockdown and everything that followed. I submitted Dropnauts to more than 140 agents, and so far I’ve had two full manuscript requests to show … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Navigating the Interregnums

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interregnum /ˌin(t)ərˈreɡnəm/ noun1) a period when normal government is suspended, especially between successive reigns or regimes.2) an interval or pause between two periods of office or other things. The world is holding its breath. As I sit here writing this, I find myself living through a number of nested interregnums. We’re still in the throes of the Great Pause, as the world tries to figure out how to live with, and ultimately get to living without, Covid-19. Here in the US, we’re in the interregnum between administrations, holding our breath and waiting for the madness of King Trump to come … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: After the War

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So I didn’t “win” Pitch Wars. My regular readers will know that I first entered this annual mentorship contest last year with “Dropnauts,” hoping to snag a mentor who would help me rework the manuscript for the Pitch Wars Agent Showcase in the spring. I didn’t even get a request from my four chosen mentors last year, and it sent me into a spiral of despair and not-writing that lasted for months. I wasn’t even going to enter this year, but a friend encouraged me to try again. So I buckled down and powered through my latest novel, wrapping up the … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Short

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Yellow pencil - Deposit Photos

For most of my life I considered myself a novel writer. Novels were my preferred reading length – I love getting lost in an epic story with lots of room to explore. Give me five-hundred pages, a thousand even, and let me roam in your world. And if it’s an epic series of 10+ books? I am so there, with reading glasses on. So it’s curious that I find myself writing lots of shorts these days too. Don’t get me wrong. I still LOVE novels (reading and writing them), and have two in progress with a third soon to be … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Writing Hope

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As a sci-fi author, I have written a number of times before about our responsibility to forecast the future, both to warn the world about what might be coming, and to share my hopes for what we might become. In these last few years, I have written four separate columns about the idea of hope and writing. In these fraught several weeks before the US election, I find myself hoping against hope for change, and then fearing the worst. Every day, there’s a new poll that reinforces that hope, and a new piece of news that dashes it. Biden’s up … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: Choosing the Perfect Title

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Book Title / Muse - Deposit Photos

So you’ve finished your book, and it’s time to change your working title into your forever one – the one that will stick with your newly finished work for the rest of it’s happy little book life… assuming your Publisher doesn’t change it later. So how do you choose the perfect title? At their best, titles do a few key things for your book. They make a bold statement about what the reader will find inside. They convey (along with the font and cover art) the genre of your book. And they tease the reader and invite them inside. A … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: The Mutable Future

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I just finished a new short story called “High Seven,” which takes place 150 years from now in a future where the world has devolved into a series of city-states that are holding on as best they can against the ravages of climate change. My view of the future has dimmed markedly over the last twenty years, and even more so over the last four. It’s hard now to see a future that’s not defined by climate change, one way or another. I still have hope, and my stories reflect that, but it’s a hope that somehow we’ll manage to … Read more

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POINT OF VIEW: (Re)Defining Success

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I’m in the middle of Pitch Wars, an annual contest to find a mentor who will then help you prep your manuscript for an agent submission showcase next spring. This is my second year participating in this amazing and terrifying event. Last year, I went into it blind, fully expecting to snag a mentor, and having no idea how many thousands of writers were doing the same thing at the same time. My four mentors received our pitches, and I waited, hopeful that I would receive a response, or maybe even more than one. A day passed, then two and … Read more