Archive for the ‘SFWA Blog’ Category

Guest Post: Checking the Gender Balance

What is happening here is the creation of what we might call “his-story”. If the only books talked about, the only books that find their way into the historical record, are books by men, then anyone looking back over time will get the impression that the only important people involved in the field, perhaps the only people involved in the field, were men.

Key Conditions for Suspense:
Part 25 – Patterns for Struggle Elements 5 & 6

The stories that use insight and decision are usually those where the main obstacle is the character’s internal problem. For example, in stories where love and friendship is on the line and the obstacle is the main character’s values, it may be that the hero has to make a decision to place love above something else.

In Memoriam: Joel Rosenberg (1954-2011)

Joel Rosenberg (b.1954) died on the evening of June 2, a day after suffering a respiratory depression that caused a heart attack, anoxic brain damage and major organ failure. Rosenberg’s first published short story was “Like the Gentle Rains” in IASFM in 1982.  A year later, he published The Sleeping Dragon, the first novel in his long-running […]

Guest Post: Proprioception

Being paralyzed led me to becoming a writer. While in that incapacitated state, I began spinning stories in order to go to the places I physically could not. It was no surprise that those stories were science fiction and fantasy, and that their main characters tended to be people with amazing abilities and “deformities.”