Hi, everyone. I haven’t abandoned the blog. I got the flu, and I’ve been taking a vacation from the computer for the first time in more than a decade. I’ll probably be back next week.

Previously I mentioned that I was having trouble with my new introduction for Shazemar, protagonist of my fantasy poem The Winds of Winter. I had a pretty decent description of him as an individual character — of the things that distinguish him from...

I had a root canal today. I’ve got another article on description mostly written, but I’m not up to finishing it tonight. So here’s a particularly interesting post on future publishing: Booking the Future, by Ransom Stephens Is the book dead? Can the...

A few weeks ago I was working on a late scene in The Winds of Winter, and it wasn’t coming together. I was wondering whether I should introduce an element that Shazemar (a sorcerer, the main character) deals with in my imagination, but which I hadn’t...

Continued from a previous post discussing differences between buying fiction and nonfiction, in which I noted that my experience as a bookbuyer suggests that some marketing techniques that work for nonfiction won’t work as well for fiction. There’s...