Shadow&Smoke

Shadow and Smoke

Announcing the long-awaited third book in author David V. Stewart's Moonsong Trilogy! Having slipped the nooses of their pursuers in Tyrant’s Gallow, Charlotte and Rone are at last in sight of their goal as they approach Golice, but things are not as they were in the ancient city of the…
February 17, 20225 Comments
patrons

Neopatronage Revisited

In light of Amazon's latest shenanigans, this time involving Dragon Award-winning mega best seller Nick Cole, author Benjamin Cheah revisits my concept of neopatronage. During the Renaissance, the wealthy supported up-and-coming artists through a patronage system. The artist was able to earn a living and create masterworks. The wealthy in…
January 19, 20229 Comments

Why Amazon Failed

The esteemed Fr. Brendon Laroche, @padrebrendon on Twitter, documents the latest shenanigans surrounding books by Conservative authors on Amazon. Consider the case of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, which I've written about here.     Deneen wasn't the only Conservative author affected. Amazon did weigh in on the controversy. Their…
May 20, 2021
The Other Amazon

The Other Amazon

Original Diablo developer Mark Kern calls out Blizzard's woke revisionism in Diablo II: Resurrected.     Mark is better qualified to take Blizzard to task than most, being a pre-Ground Zero game dev from the days when developers made games for players, not for themselves. Author Adam Lane Smith sums…
April 16, 20215 Comments
eBook Zombie Memes Won’t Die

eBook Zombie Memes Won’t Die

If recent events have taught us anything, it's that we can't trust experts or establishment media. Independent journalists and internal whistleblowers caught Google manipulating search results around the 2016 election. More than one online consumer revolt disclosed that journalists maintain secret email lists to collude on disinfo ops. All of…
April 12, 202110 Comments
Pacing Lessons from Fury Road

Pacing Lessons from Fury Road

Many writers labor under a common misconception about what makes a book feel fast-paced. Slamming chapters together with no space in-between doesn't necessarily give readers a sense of speed. In fact, it can do the opposite by bringing on action fatigue. Pacing has less to do with keeping lots of…
March 10, 20216 Comments
The Big Four

The Big Four

A predictive model is only as good as its results. That means a reliable way to assess the value of a business strategy is to look at the projections made by people who employ that strategy. If their predictions based on a given model consistently pan out, it's a good…
November 27, 202010 Comments
Art Lasts

Art Lasts

Hang out around science fiction authors long enough, and you get the sense that they're all crazy. John Scalzi claims that Donald Trump and the weather conspired to give him writer's block. Patrick Rothfuss and George R. R. Martin have cited similarly temperamental reasons for not finishing their popular series.…
October 28, 20209 Comments
The Editor Defined

The Editor Defined

Publishing is an old industry that's assembled its own internal lexicon. As you'll find with any trade, publishing jargon can be difficult for laymen--and even authors--to decipher. A widely misunderstood term is the deceptively simple title of editor. When most people; again even some authors, hear the word "editor", they…
August 20, 2020
How Does Your Magic Work?

How Does Your Magic Work?

A speculative element is what sets the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror apart from literary fiction. There's no element more speculative than magic, and it's become a common term of art to speak of an SFF universe's "magic system". By reader request, here is my philosophy of magic…
August 17, 202028 Comments