12 Tips for Picking a Good Story Title

 A writer-friend was blocked. Three thousand words into writing a new story, he still didn’t know what to call it. All forward progress on writing the actual story had stopped, as he was flummoxed by his lack of a good title for his work-in-progress. In desperation, he turned to social media…That’s where I found him, floundering, flailing, collecting bad advice, and wasting...

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Lastday: Stupefying Stories 22

Stupefying Stories 22 has reached the end of contract life and goes out of print at midnight(ish) tonight.* This is your last chance to get this book for the closeout price of just 99¢ for the Kindle edition or free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.[* Weirdly enough, while Amazon lets me set a “goes live” date, it does not let me set an “unpublish” date. Thus the actual...

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T minus 4: Stupefying Stories 22 goes out of print on Friday

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T-5: Stupefying Stories 22 is going out of print

 Stupefying Stories 22 has reached the end of it’s contract life and goes out of print at the end of this week. To close it out with a bang, we’ve lowered the price of the Kindle edition to just 99¢ and made it free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.  (Personally, I think you should get the print edition, as it looks much cooler.)Stupefying Stories 22 features:THE...

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A little something for the weekend?

 At last, a movie that answers the question: “Is it possible for the original creator of a groundbreaking work to return to it years later and produce a follow-on work that is so lame, derivative, self-indulgent, self-referential, and unimaginative that it could be mistaken for fanfic and leaves you wondering if the original actually was all that brilliant and groundbreaking,...

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Creating Alien Aliens, Part 16 A: Communicating With Sapient Aliens? How?

Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota. Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS...

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Reminder: Last Chance to get Stupefying Stories 22

Stupefying Stories #22 has reached the end of it’s contract life and goes out of print at the end of this month. To close it out with a bang, we’ve lowered the price of the Kindle edition to just 99¢ and made it free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.  (Personally, I think you should get the print edition, as it looks much cooler.)Stupefying Stories #22 features:THE SHE-DRAGON...

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A little something for the weekend?

Sorry, no long post today. I had every intention of writing a brilliant column this morning but then got the chance to spend time with my grandchildren instead. Among other things, we went into the collection and picked out a few books for them to take home. The grandson left with Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky while the granddaughter took Patricia Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons.Days don’t get much better than this....

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Emerald of Earth – CHAPTER 11: Deeper Into SOLAREX

Almost-thirteen Emerald Marcillon lives with her parents, who have dug up evidence of aliens in Chicxilub Crater in Yucatan, they have found artifacts that point to a long-ago alien war. An alien artificial intelligence called Inamma has survived that war. It tries to steal the artifacts that when assembled, can destroy all of Humanity. But it can’t find them and kills Emerald’s...

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Sci-Fi vs Western: Clash of the Genres

 Ever since the subject of Wild Wild West came up again, I’ve been thinking critically about the dichotomy between science fiction and the Western pulp genre. I’ve developed a theory that I think I will write more about later, but right now, I’m wondering why Western motifs and thematic elements work so well for horror and with such difficulty in hard science fiction. My...

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Last Chance: Stupefying Stories 22 is going out of print

One of the fundamental mistakes I made when I created Stupefying Stories was stipulating that the e-books would have a limited shelf-life. As a result, STUPEFYING STORIES #22 has reached the end of its contract life and goes out of print on April 1st.To (so to speak) close the books on SS#22, therefore, we’re running a 99-cent sale. For the next two weeks, STUPEFYING STORIES...

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Wild Wild West Revisited: A Few Last Words

 Previously: Part One | Part Two Whenever we talk about the Wild Wild West fiasco, I usually let it slip that one of the reasons why I found the project appealing was that someone over at Warner Books suggested that if the book was a commercial success, it could lead to a series of WWWest-branded steampunk westerns, to be authored by yours truly. Whether this idea...

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Talking Shop: Embracing the Anti-Hero • By Eric Dontigney

There is a terribly thin line between an anti-hero and a straight-up villain. It’s a line that Craig Schaefer admirably straddles in his Daniel Faust series. Faust is our protagonist in the books, and he reads a bit like a knock-around hero at first. As time goes by, though, you realize that this guy is no kind of hero. He’s a magic-fueled criminal. And he’s not some...

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A little something for the weekend?

 “King Kong doesn’t stand a chance,” the Kid said. “Godzilla is a gigantic, primordial, atomic fire-breathing monster. King Kong is just a big gorilla. Realistically, Godzilla—”Wait. Stop right there. “Realistically” and “Godzilla” don’t belong in the same sentence. They barely belong in the same universe. If you’re going to think realistically about anything involving...

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Wild Wild West Revisited, Part 2

A few years after the interview in Part One appeared, an earnest young writer by the name of Kimberly interviewed me for an article about the business of writing movie novelizations. Apparently she was under the impression that this was the sort of writing career one could aspire to have. While I tried to let her down gently, I later learned that there actually is an organization...

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