Earning the Proposal Romance writers have it easy in one specific way. The proposal is allowed to land. It can be the spine of the book. Everyone bought the book for it. The whole genre is a delivery mechanism for the moment one person asks another person a question and gets the …

Here’s a problem every writer in deep first person eventually runs into. Your narrator gets ambushed. Or jumped. Or shot at. Suddenly the camera is locked inside a person who can’t pull back, can’t pan, can’t see around the corner — and who, if we’re being honest, can barely see …

I was seventeen and it was past midnight and I had school in the morning and the book I was reading — Ender’s Game, borrowed from a friend who’d said “just read it” with the intensity of someone trying to share something they couldn’t explain — had done something to me I didn’t h…

The problem had a very specific shape, and I found it by running the math. Partway through Book 2 of the Technomancer series, I’d established that one day in the realm of Elysia corresponds to roughly π days on Earth — 3.14 to one. I chose π deliberately: it’s irrational, it neve…

The first story in the An Author’s Voice narrated series is Signal Zero — the beginning of the Integration Era, and a good place to start if you’ve never read it. Sergeant Voss has been guarding an archaeological dig on a frontier world for eleven weeks. His job is straightforwar…

Welcome to “An Author’s Voice” where I’ll discuss the craft behind writing and illustrate the points with my own work or discuss other well known examples. Episode Three : The Quiet Apocalypse This post accompanies Episode 3 of An Author’s Voice. If you haven’t listened yet, the …

Welcome to “An Author’s Voice” where I’ll discuss the craft behind writing and illustrate the points with my own work or discuss other well known examples. Episode Two : The Dirty Secret of First Person: Your Narrator Is Lying You know that feeling — three chapters into a novel, …

Voices by Speechify Welcome to “An Author’s Voice” where I’ll discuss the craft behind writing and illustrate the points with my own work or discuss other well known examples. Episode One : The Perception Filter Technomancer is a multiple POV novel blending science fiction and fa…