Assassins, Exotic Locales, and Cyber Warfare…oh my!
I took a break from my usual science fiction and sci-fi military reading and film consumption to binge read one of my favorite authors. I read the John Rain thrillers over a decade ago. Our moody anti-hero, John Rain, is a disenchanted Vietnam vet turned contract...
Level Up Your Military Sci Fi Summer Reading Game Now
Ah, summer. It’s time to hit the beach and grab a good book, right? Well, it used to be like that before I had kids. Now it’s more like, “what sports camp are they at this week and do I have to make their lunches?” However, the summer...
If You See It, You Can Believe It
An author I really admire and enjoy once shared her character inspiration board on Twitter. She had assembled a number of vintage photos (Victorian era) onto a Pinterest board for her steampunk romance. I thought that was pretty brilliant. So a social media tool that...
Renegade Profiles: Sci-Fi Author Jon Cronshaw
Author Jon Cronshaw JV: Why do dystopian/post-apocalypse novels all have zombies? Haha. Although these sub-genres have a lot of crossover, they also seem to be tackling different primal questions. With dystopian fiction, the core questions are about the ways people...
Nail Your Opening Line With Tips From The Great Masters
It’s hard to write that first hook. You want to grab your reader, drag them right into your story…but how? I struggled to do this so I just started pulling books off the shelf. Some of these opening paragraphs (or even just the first sentence) really...
Techology + Teamwork = Magic
When Writers Get Together and Use Instafreebie I wanted to start building a newsletter mailing list of science fiction fans for the launch of Cold War. So I started from zero. After Ken formatted our book on Draft2Digital, I put it up on Instafreebie. The first few...
Deadlines Boost Your Skills Now
My co-writer and I were talking tonight about how we work better under pressure. When we entered a short story contest, we both cranked it out in a few days and then we ended up expanding and polishing those pieces into a much larger work. Under that same theory,...
Deep Work – Productivity Boosts For Writers and Creatives
Everybody has been talking about Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World so I finally decided to get the Audible for it. It’s amazing. He’s a computer science professor who usually writes books for high...
What’s Your Passion Project? What Will You Do to Get it Made?
We went to Alexander Hamilton last weekend. I was absolutely blown away. Then I bought the CD Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording)(Explicit)(2CD) and have played it in the car non-stop since then. If you haven’t been following the hype, it is a hip hop...
Marketing Monday – A Free Story
This weekend was basically a crash course in indie publishing: Ken and I finished the book learned how to format it in Draft2Digital (love them) write a blurb load the book on Instafreebie sign up for a Sci-Fi cross-promo link it to our Mailchimp list, and set up the...