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Horrotica for Prudes
There’s been a lot of discourse on gore of late in this blog, but not much about sex. Maybe that’s because it’s a ‘touchy’ subject (pun intended)? It certainly appears to be so in the world of book marketing, in my experience, and that’s what I’m taking exception to today. To my knowledge, there’s really…
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Gore Revisited
Or, The Pale Blue Dot and Existential Dread Last month I posted why I don’t write gore. You can read it here. Four excellent comments were posted and I decided that rather than reply to each one individually, I’d reply to the thoughts that were expressed in a follow-up post. So here we go! It’s…
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The Bouncer
Welcome back to my series on the writers who most influenced my style. Today I’m going to discuss the third face on my personal Mount Rushmore, R.A. (Robert) Salvatore. Robert writes the Drizzt Do’Urden saga, a series of 53 novels written between 1988 and today. Two of them are spin-offs focusing on minor characters met…
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ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
Jimi Hendrix was one of the greatest guitarists ever, and one fine musician. I think a lot of folks miss that great musicians are also great writers. Sure, their style is more poetic and concise than say, a lengthy and involved novel, but the appreciation and skill of the Craft is there nonetheless. I thought…
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Crossover Characters
Ever since I was a kid, my friends and I would play games where we asked what would happen if characters from different fictional universes met. What would happen if Batman met The Green Hornet? What if Captain Kirk and the Doctor from Doctor Who shared an adventure? Who would win if the Predator and…
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Nothing to Say
“How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?” – the late great John Prine. There are many reasons why this happens in a relationship, most of them unpleasant when it applies to couples. But it only applies to my book writing…
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The Misogynist
Welcome back to my series on the influencers of my writing style. The second face on my personal Mount Rushmore of mentors is John Frederick Lange Jr., or to use his more familiar pen name, John Norman. As well as being a writer, Norman was also a professor of philosophy with a particular focus on…
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Universal Expansion
Have you ever looked back one day as an author and realized how your world ballooned? I just did this morning. I’ve been writing for nine years now, mostly in the lane I call the Legacy Universe, a fictional realm wherein superhumans were made in the 1870s and this caused history to change in big…