How will we swear in The Future?

Over the course of four manuscripts, I discovered that my natural genre is science fiction romance–sort of space-going international thrillers with a happy-ending romance thrown in. Hey, romance is consistently more than half of mass market paperbacks sold; I’m not completely stupid.
So here’s the weird thing: I’ve entered contests, I’ve sent out manuscripts for cold [...]

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New Posts

Just an administrative note. I have imported all of the posts from my local Speculative Fiction group’s blog – Boise Spec Fic. So if you venture in time back to before we started Genre Bender, you will see posts from that blog. There are a few gems back there, do take a [...]

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Norwescon

Anyone planning on going to Norwescon, April 09?

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I’ve got over a 7000 word vocabulary and I ain’t afraid to use it

I’ve made the comment that to learn dialog you should study the stand up comedians. Well, the humorists also are great users of the language. Roy Blunt, Jr. was on the Bob Edwards Weekend show a few weekends ago. I suggest you download and listen to it (free podcast). Bob also interviews a great many [...]

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I write I’m sorry but my letter keeps coming back

S. Andrew Swann points us (through his blog post which has a really good LOLcat) to a new publishing group at HarperCollins that’s trying something different. Here is a Reuters article giving the basic overview and a NYT article with more details about the new group and what they maybe trying to do.
I think it’s [...]

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Tip of the Day – compfight.com

This one is totally tippy.
I stole the idea from Matt. Our blog artwork (a.k.a. cool chick with the hair) is a CC licensed image from Flickr. Matt linked to the full image on the About page as required by the license. He always uses compfight.com to search for artwork and photography, because you can click [...]

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Space Westerns

I like Westerns. I always watch a good Western when I come across it on TV. Recently, I even read my first Louis L’Amour book – Fallon. I intend to read more Westerns in the coming months. In fact, it could become my number one genre choice in 2009. There [...]

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Story Editing

Yesterday I started on the fourth rewrite of A History of Lightning, my l latest short story. Actually, I started the keying in part, I’d already completed the “combining all the suggestions from the critique group” and the “put in all the notes you have on scraps of paper” part. And as a demonstration of [...]

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Tip of the Day – Judge for a Contest

Tip of the Day which is never daily and occasionally tip like.

Stephen King, in his how to book, said that writers should read. Even the bad stuff. You learn from others mistakes and successes. And the best place to see a variety is in a contest.
There are no restrictions or expectations because they are not [...]

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Five Not-So Random Link Post

Justine Larbalestier has a few things to say on the need to prefect your craft. I’ll reiterate here a comment I made there, in every thing you try in life you’ll eventually reach a point where it becomes hard. What you do at that point determines what you really love, and what should just be [...]

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