As an author, you often hear that you should pick a genre and stick with it. Does anyone else find this as impossible as I do? I love speculative fiction. ALL speculative fiction. And, going back to Thursday’s post, it’s so hard to separate the genres out completely anyway. Fantasy, for example, is such a [...]

Answer: is there one? Kit, you say, of course. One has aliens and the other has elves. Both of which are made-up creatures that have no basis in reality. So where’s the difference again? Kit, you say, one has space travel and one has magic. Well, as we recently discussed, some people think that space [...]

Just to be clear, we’re not talking about getting on a spaceship and jetting about the galaxy. It’s pretty clear which that one is. (Unless the spaceship runs on unicorns and rainbows, I suppose. …and now I want to write that.) We’re talking wardrobes, portals, holes in the ground, white rabbits. Sounds fairly typically fantasy, [...]

I was tempted to have this post’s title rival Tuesday’s, but then I got lazy. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend of using real people – authors particularly – as characters in novels. I guess it was only a matter of time. Once you get past some of History’s most iconic works and characters, people start [...]

Aside from being an obnoxiously long title for a blog post, have you noticed this? You’re talking to someone about the latest big science fiction movie. They’re excited for it. So you’re like, oh, hey, a kindred soul, and ask if they’ve read the latest book by big name science fiction author. And they give [...]