In the Gulf of Mexico: the Deepwater Horizon oil-well blow-out. In Japan: nuclear-reactor meltdowns. Across the Middle East: revolution, civil war, and chaos.

It’s enough to make a person wonder: what if something major ever went wrong with the world’s energy supplies? Something like, say, the Crudetastrope?

There are tons of great resources on writing fiction, and I won’t even attempt to get into all that information here. What I’m going to focus on are the macro, big-picture things I’ve learned through personal experience.

Two fascinating surveys appeared this week. They look at opposite ends of the writing business, but dovetail in interesting ways.

The Writers’ Wo…

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.