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Writing YA Fiction

Imagine your whole school can see your stats A sixteen-year-old, one humiliating half second, and the reckless thing he does to prove it wasn’t the whole story. You already know where you rank. Somebody decided years ago, the label stuck, and most days it feels settled. The athle…

OODA Loops by Example

Last time, I argued that revision is an OODA loop, and that the step most writers skip is Orient — the move where you frame what you’ve read against what the passage is actually for, before you change a single word. That’s easy to assert and harder to show. So this dispatch is on…

OODA Loops for Editing

When you’re stuck in rewrite hell — version after version, none of them actually better — the problem usually isn’t your writing skill. It’s something quieter that most writers never name. Most revisions fight themselves. Here’s why. Every working writer has felt the difference b…

In Defense of the Adverb

The adverb prohibition was never a rule. It was a Strunk & White nervous tic that became orthodoxy — and our prose got worse for it. The prohibition isn’t entirely wrong. There’s a real craft problem buried inside it, and the rule was an attempt to solve it. But somewhere between…

Naming as Theme

A few episodes ago, I told you about a moment in a short story I wrote called “Signal Zero.” A military sergeant gets ambushed by an alien intelligence — and inside that ambush, the system gives him a designation. It calls him Sentinel. And next to Sentinel, a number: Frame: Seve…

Earning the Proposal

Earning the Proposal Romance writers have it easy in one specific way. The proposal is allowed to land. It can be the spine of the book. Everyone bought the book for it. The whole genre is a delivery mechanism for the moment one person asks another person a question and gets the …

When the Bullets Are Real

Here’s a problem every writer in deep first person eventually runs into. Your narrator gets ambushed. Or jumped. Or shot at. Suddenly the camera is locked inside a person who can’t pull back, can’t pan, can’t see around the corner — and who, if we’re being honest, can barely see …

Why We All Like Story — What Fiction Does That Nothing Else Can

I was seventeen and it was past midnight and I had school in the morning and the book I was reading — Ender’s Game, borrowed from a friend who’d said “just read it” with the intensity of someone trying to share something they couldn’t explain — had done something to me I didn’t h…

When Time Breaks

The problem had a very specific shape, and I found it by running the math. Partway through Book 2 of the Technomancer series, I’d established that one day in the realm of Elysia corresponds to roughly π days on Earth — 3.14 to one. I chose π deliberately: it’s irrational, it neve…

Both Ages at Once: Writing a Narrator Who Is Simultaneously 65 and 15

There are two ways to fail this particular craft problem, and they both destroy reader trust in different directions. Paul Taylor in Another Past is sixty-five years old — a physicist who died in a lab explosion and woke up fourteen years old in 1979. He has the full memory and e…

Writing update – March 2026

I’ve been busy writing, editing, and working on my marketing via social media lately. Here’s a brief update on what’s been happening in my world of writing. Technomancer Book 2 Beta reading has begun on Technomancer: The Awakened Mage. Advanced Reader Copies (ARC) should be sent …

“Ask this Book”???

Amazon has rolled out a feature for Kindle-based ebooks. If you haven’t seen stories on this, you should check out thesearticles. **The short version: **Amazon AI will generate answers to questions about your books. This seems like a neat feature for readers, which is how Amazon …