New Podcast Up: Everybody Was Kung Fu Farming

Richard Kutz and I absolutely love AMC’s Into the Badlands.  If you aren’t watching it right now, you should.  The writing is excellent, the world building is amazing and who doesn’t love farmers who know kung fu?  We also discuss a little known film that is close to our heart entitled Hunter/Prey.  The writing in this film

3 Writing Tips Gleaned from Ambrose Bierce

Right now my students are reading Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge“.  The short story always brings forth different reactions from my students, mostly that some of them see the ending before it hits them, but this is because Bierce is dropping hints throughout the text that illustrate the fact of the surprise

Writing Progress: The Conundrum

Word Count of Novel: 9399 I wrote some good dialogue today.  The female lead is really annoyed at the main character right now…and will be for some time.  It’s fun making their relationship complicated.  She’s pretty mysterious, but doesn’t really need him around after all.  The scary monsters I introduced in yesterday’s session have been

5 Things ’77 Star Wars Taught Me About Storytelling

In a little over a week, fans and non-fans alike will be flocking to the local theater to gobble up the next installment, and shall I say “revamping” of the Star Wars saga. I, for one, am looking forward to it. I have a screen quality costume that I constructed a few years ago.  It’s

“14” by Peter Clines: Why Writers Should Read It

Peter Clines is a fantastic writer.  What makes him a fantastic writer is not necessarily his prose style or his ability to make conversations between characters seem real and natural (which he does).  However, he has an ability to take something in the real world and make it real enough and believable enough to force

Giving a Protagonist a Hidden Motivation

Recently I have been in the middle of writing the first installment of a new series entitled The Five Rims.  The first book is titled The Last Terran, and my protagonist is definitely out of the ordinary. Guillermo March is a former security officer with the C’Tuulian Planetary Police Force, the only Terran to work for them,

A Pattern Found In the Work of Philip K. Dick

I have, and always shall be, a fan of Phillip K. Dick.  I know that there were some questionable practices in his life, namely drug use, but his writing stands out as some of the most amazing and unique prose in the genre of science-fiction.  I don’t believe that he wrote his novels while in

The Do’s and Don’ts of Dialogue

It seems that the more current fiction I read these days the more dialogue I am seeing in the text.  As a matter of fact, most novels written today are heavy on the dialogue and lighter on the long paragraphs of detailed description. Dialogue is a tool used to further the action, to give us

3 Kick In the Pants Tips for Tired Workaday Writers

This has been a rough week. Of course, as a high school English teacher who teaches two Advanced Placement courses and also manages the after school alternative education program…and also the supplemental online schooling program…most weeks are tough. They are ten times that when I want to write something and get home and there are

Removing Delusions: Positive Character Role Models

As a writer with children I am always thinking about the characters I create in my novels and how they might be seen by young children or teens.  My books are written with adults in mind, but it seems that more and more teens are reading my them, especially the books that are adventure stories