When a character swims across the Arctic Ocean, in a story set a thousand years in the future, what stars might she use to guide her passage westward?

I love worldbuilding. I love using symbolic and metaphorical social constructions to exaggerate and concentrate the issues we deal with in the real world.

I absolutely love the military, but I’m not blind to the challenges and limitations of the life either. Control Point was definitely a steam valve in some respects.

Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, held in Laramie, Wyoming, is now accepting applications for its 2012 session.

I’ve written too many stories and books now to not notice patterns of theme, image, character type, etc, emerge over and over. It can be a bit disconcerting to see ones own obsessions so clearly after a while. But the upside is that you can then take possession of those obsessions consciously, and mold them in ways that you might not have when you hadn’t realized they were there in the first place.

A good story should always be raising questions — not asking them directly, but instead forcing the reader to ask them. “Wait, what’s that weird symbol they keep seeing on the walls? What was that sound? Something’s up with that top hat-wearing fox that keeps following them, too.

Today, when the dominant form of communication is email, it’s easy to go through your publicity campaign without ever hearing your publicist’s voice. This would be a mistake.

I worked for thirteen years, failed to sell four novels, wrote short stories for a while after I gave up on novels, and eventually got up the guts to write more novels. My fifth and sixth novels were the ones that sold. The common thread through all of that is that I like the act of writing.

A couple of days ago I covered Facebook’s new direction, including both the potential large upside for writers and the accompanying privacy concerns. But what about Google+?

A machine that creates gourmet meals-on-the-go in exchange for credits is still just a vending machine.