Happy New Year!  With Book 2 (Prometheus Revealed) out the door to my beta testers (proofreaders), I’ve returned to Book 1 (Prometheus Rebound) to implement some more changes for sake of overall consistency.  I have to express once more my gratefulness that this book did not publish in November 2011, and that I’ve had another year+ to continue tweaking it.

Interestingly enough, only some of the “consistency” changes I’m making are related to plot or characters.  Just as many of the changes I’ve set out to make are related to the tone and style of the prose.  Read the rest of this entry »

No one wants to partake of a story – whatever its form – in which every character is cuddly and loveable.  You need those characters that you “love to hate.”  Sometimes they’re villains, sometimes they’re rivals.  Darth Vader.  Severus Snape.  Peter Wiggin.  Inspector Javert.  Sawyer (or whatever his name is) from Lost.  These characters add a lot to a story, sometimes emotional depth, sometimes humor.  You can’t help but root for them even as you root against them.

And then there are those characters that you really just hate, no two ways about it.  Read the rest of this entry »

Research is an integral part of writing any story set in the real world, because no matter how knowledgeable an author may be, a good story must inevitably grow beyond the confines of his or her personal experience.  Fortunately, these days, we have this thing called the Internet, with websites like Wikipedia.  And while I have poured many, many full days into doing nothing but researching scenes and settings and science – just about everything that goes into one of my stories – the fact remains that once I figure out the question I’m wanting to ask, I can usually find the information I need online.

How did novelists manage this before the advent of the Internet?  Read the rest of this entry »

As frustrated as I was at having to delay publication of my first novel, that decision has given me the time to keep working on it.  And to commission a legal review… the results of which were rather astounding.

Some things I understand, even if they may have crept into my story.  For example, you don’t ever want to mention a character using some brand-name product in a way inconsistent with its intended purpose… especially if that use involves hurting other people.  As you might imagine, companies tend to frown on that sort of negative association with their brands.

But that kind of thing was just the tip of the iceberg.  Read the rest of this entry »