My daughter Athena was born in 1998, and once my wife completed her six-week maternity leave, I was and still am the stay-at-home parent, caring for our daughter Athena during the day. Along the way I’ve also managed to write a dozen books and literally thousands of articles and entries for magazines, newspapers, blogs and online sites. How have I managed to juggle kid-watching duties with writing work?
Inside of genre circles, “YA” seems to be taking hold as a catch-all term for anything written for anyone under 18. Since so many people use YA as a catch-all, it’s becoming a catch-all, so how children’s book industry people define the category doesn’t matter. Does it?
An important part of developing as a writer is learning when to trust your voice, and how to tell the difference between trusting your vision and being stubborn about something that doesn’t work.
When I consider trying to maintain my writing and care for human children, my head boggles. Others have done it, wresting time and space while caring for family. I decided to ask a small panel of talented writers and fellow SFWA members about how they did it
Monica Valentinelli talks about what it means to write non-fiction for the web versus writing for a print publication like a magazine.
Article by Chuck Rothman on (almost) everything you need to know about agents, including how to avoid scams.
One of the things that bothers me sometimes when looking at world-building is the way people don’t think about where objects come from. What is the industry that fuels the region? Where does all that paper come from in Battlestar Galactica? So this essay on the origins of a pencil tickles me no end, and […]
Article by science fiction writer Vonda N. McIntyre on manuscript preparation for SF/F genre fiction authors.
Article by Elizabeth Moon on advice for novice writers. Novice writers have to take some responsibility for their own careers. The good information is NOT that hard to find. The novices who don’t find it–and don’t find it repeatedly–are resisting the truth.
Article by John Gregory Betancourt on the correct manuscript format for sf/f fiction.
Seven fantasy short stories that take the reader to the Kingdom of Imlay, a coastal realm still full of magic and mythical creatures great and small. Original and poignant, these tales will challenge the intellect and enlarge the imagination.
Debbie Urbanski is the author of the story collection Portalmania (S&S, May 2025) and the climate AI novel After World (S&S, 2023), which was a Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Engadget, Strange Horizons, & Booklist Best Book of the Year.
