I saw Skyfall not long after it opened. Then I read some reviews. One reviewer commented that the villain did not show up until the mid-point in the story, “which was a gutsy move.” Having studied a fair-amount of story plotting, I think the reviewer got it wrong because he wasn’t paying attention to the …

I’m finally in pre-production for Bellicose, the first of the Postal Marine Series. Last Fall, I published Scintilla, which was always meant to be the fourth of a series of five novels. I quickly plotted the second novel Luctation, a novel portraying Jonaldy, Scintilla’s villain as the hero. After grinding out 20,000 …

Have you ever known somebody who turned out to be somebody else? Come to rely on that person, that go-to person, only to find out he had feet of clay? Sometimes that friend was never your friend, they were just setting you up for their advantage. I’m going to talk about a friend who did not betray me, but he let me down …

It took me a while to regain my momentum, but Scintilla has gone through its revision. Scintilla is a Sci-Fi novel about three cultures in collision. On one hand, you have the mighty Core. You also have the backwater world of Kopio, with its aristocrats and peasants. Its fundamental question is about freedom.

Just about every writer’s resources says to take time away from your writing project after the first draft. It’s like spending an intense amount of time with a loved one, then abstaining for a while to make sure you’re objective about the relationship. Or, whatever. How long is open to interpretation, but I …