Upcoming Writing Classes Online

Continuing my work with Orange County Library System, I’ve added another writing class to this year’s schedule. These classes are held over Zoom, so anyone anywhere may attend. The Library Card field on the registration form is optional. If you don’t have an OCLS library card, just leave it blank. …

Coming Soon: Books and Courses

You all know that I’ve had several projects back-burnered for a while now, including the second and third books in the Prophet’s Chronicle series and my online editing course for writers, Edit Your Novel Like a Pro. After leaving these idling for ages while I went about the business of, …

When to Use Commas Between Adjectives

This question comes up often in my editing: should or shouldn’t there be commas between adjectives in a string? I hate to tell you this but … it depends. Yeah, I know, English is complicated. That’s why I’m here. I swear, we don’t make up these rules just to keep …

Create Fictional Languages Without ConLangs

Constructed Languages like Elvish and Klingon are a vital part of much speculative fiction. But you needn’t be a linguist like Tolkein or Okrand to incorporate distinct fictional languages into your storyworld. You can use what we know about real-world languages to give the impression your characters are speaking different …

How to Go Deeper into Characters’ Emotions

One of the most frequent comments editors make on new writers’ manuscripts is to go deeper into characters’ emotions. Readers come to narrative stories for an emotional experience. So authors, both of fiction and of narrative nonfiction, need to go beyond telling the reader how a character feels. The goal …

Dictionaries Don’t Know Everything

One duty of a copyeditor is to check spelling, including whether a term should be solid, hyphenated, or open. Some terms are open, that is, they are written as two words, e.g., living room. If you search for livingroom (closed) at Merriam-Webster, you’ll be redirected to the page for living room (open).

The Prophet’s Chronicle Storyworld

One of the things fiction allows us to do is examine hypothetical situations that don’t exist in the real world. A novel is a large-scale thought experiment. This is true of any fiction, but doubly true in speculative fiction. The whole point of science fiction and fantasy is to explore …