It’s been difficult to write 1994-2011; this is quite a long era, from my thirties to my fifties, with several deluded sub-eras as well as breakthroughs. But the period seems anchored at each end: beginning with The Soul Institute charting … Continue reading →
I’m struck by the veering between successes and failures in this period, losing control and skidding across all four lanes until I’d finally get enough sense to stop the car and take a good look around. Had I never learned … Continue reading →
A. Property What if anyone could ask for anything you owned and keep it for thirty days until someone else wanted it … your home, your car … even your body? Members of the Forensic Squad theatrical troupe find themselves … Continue reading →
Trantor Group CEO Peter Trantor scrambles to reassure his latest client, the lovely but unreadable bank executive Anna Winstead, that his telepathic Sortmind app really isn’t as deadly as people assume. But he has some explaining to do when a … Continue reading →
Aside from a couple early practice novels, Akard Drearstone was my first real novel and my attachment to it has been deep. Was gestation to publication really forty-two years? Well, this novel has been on my mind since 1975; in … Continue reading →
I culled this post from the sortmind.com University of Mars page. I’ve always enjoyed this essay as a solid analysis of an unpublishable old novel, but it’s really a blog post, lost on a bazillion pages on sortmind.com, so I’m … Continue reading →
What would my or any current writer’s career have been like if there were no Internet or word processing, no eBooks or online publishers? Even if the invention of digital computing machines was inevitable, consider that there was no guarantee … Continue reading →
The following is a partial list of discoveries I’ve made in the last few years that have benefited my own writing, and which I also find myself attuned to as I read others’ writing. I’m not trying to pose as … Continue reading →
No one wants to take the author’s word for it that his or her writing is good–not the slush pile reader, not the editor, not the editorial board, not the marketing staff, not the sales force, not the average reader … Continue reading →
Come on, really–what DOES it mean? Sending query letters to literary agents was one of my more useless wastes of time and energy, but one submission–and it might have been the last one to an agent, a couple years ago–brought … Continue reading →
