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Breaking a Toxic Cycle: A #HoldOnToTheLight Post

Take a moment to think about the word “fitness.” What images pop into your head? First, you probably think about activities that really make you sweat. Maybe you imagine yourself running outdoors in the fresh air, doing bodyweight training, or taking a bike trip. Visit Thehealthmania to learn more about other healthy habits. But fitness is much more than just exercise: it’s a lifestyle – and this includes a healthy diet and healthy habits along with the right amount of exercise. Can fitness do more than just improve your health? Can it help you more effectively deal with daily stress? ThisContinue readingBreaking a Toxic Cycle: A #HoldOnToTheLight Post

Writing Pulp for the Modern Reader

I love the old pulp masters. I grew up reading Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, E.E. “Doc” Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and those authors made an indelible impression on my creative psyche. I devoured those stories, and they stuck in me down deep in the leaf mold. (See my essay “Cultivating the Fungus”.) The trouble is, if I go back and read those stories, I cannot help but do it with a modern eye, through my modern sensibilities. Unfortunately, as much as I loved it as a kid, a lot of that stuff doesn’t read veryContinue readingWriting Pulp for the Modern Reader

Mashing Up the Old West

If you’re of a certain age in the U.S., you were raised with Westerns. John Ford and Sergio Leone filled cinemas and TV screens with John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, the dust of cattle drives, the thunder of cavalry, guns, and the war whoops of Indians. By the time of my childhood, Western films were in their declining years, covering ground so well-trodden the genre itself had become cliché, a collection of easily recognizable and increasingly tired tropes. However, the genre never quite made it to the grave. Since the Western film’s heyday, we’ve been graced with some spectacularly goodContinue readingMashing Up the Old West

Wattpad: A New Experiment for an Old Work

If you’ve read my “Cautionary Tales for Writers” over on the left hand page of this blog, you know a bit of history about my early forays into writing and publishing. The first novel I published was an epic fantasy called The Ivory Star, back in 1997. For almost twenty years, it languished on my hard drive, untouched. Then Wattpad came along, and it seemed like the perfect venue to introduce my early work to a new generation of readers. So I commissioned a snazzy new cover and put the book out there to see what would happen. Lo andContinue readingWattpad: A New Experiment for an Old Work

Poker Hand – The Eternal Struggle

Tip #1: Play Fewer Hands And Play Them Aggressively There is a limit on how many starting hands you can play before the flop in No Limit Texas Hold’em, even for the world’s best players. If you try to play too many hands, you’ll bleed away your chip stack (unless lady luck is on your side). Developing a solid preflop poker strategy is by far the easiest and fastest way to improve your bottom line. However, while developing solid preflop ranges is relatively easy to do (like by downloading our free preflop charts) having the discipline to stick to them is difficult.Continue readingPoker Hand – The Eternal Struggle

Cultivating the Fungus

“One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.” – J. R. R. Tolkien, on the creation of The Lord of theContinue readingCultivating the Fungus

Pages of Inspiration

Losing weight is hard. And keeping it off? Even harder—almost to the point that shedding pounds for good can feel like a Sisyphean struggle. That’s probably why, according to recent research out of JAMA, that the amount of overweight people in the United States consistently rises while, at the same time, fewer people than ever are embarking on weight loss journeys of their own. But what these struggling souls may not know is that losing weight doesn’t have to be such an arduous slog. In fact, by deploying the right methods, weight loss can be effortless, entertaining, and, most importantly, effective. The firstContinue readingPages of Inspiration

A New Paradigm for Old Time Patronage

Something new has appeared in the wondrous–and sometimes helpful–oddities of the internet. A means whereby creative folks like myself can gather their most ardent fans to chip in a few bucks every time the creator does something cool. It’s a new form of crowdfunding called Patreon. I’ve been hankering for a few months to try it, but first I had to do some soul-searching, get some life-changes squared away, and move to another country two hemispheres away from my old digs in Colorado. I’ll be living in New Zealand until mid-2016. I’ve done two successful Kickstarters for the last twoContinue readingA New Paradigm for Old Time Patronage

Scenes: It Ain’t Just the Cliffhanger

This year, the editor of my Ronin Trilogy gave me an incredible compliment: “In Spirit of the Ronin, every scene does exactly what you intend it to do.” On a day when I was dreadfully worried about whether the newly finished novel draft was any good, this came at the perfect time. I’ll quickly avert my gaze from the implication that apparently I didn’t quite hit that mark every time in previous books. Chalk it up to the learning process. A lot of know-how about writing scenes is packed into this one sentence, and it comes in levels and/or numberContinue readingScenes: It Ain’t Just the Cliffhanger

Sword of the Ronin Featured in Historical Fiction Story Bundle

Sword of the Ronin meets nine other historical eras in this fabulous e-book bundle from Story Bundle: The Historical Fiction Bundle. From Story Bundle’s website: “History is made up of stories, and those stories are vast, and varied beyond compare. The Historical Fiction Bundle comprises a total of ten terrific titles by top-notch authors, together representing exactly this breadth and variety of experience. These stories blend real-world historical settings with romance, adventure, fantasy and mystery to bring you whole worlds of fun! You’ll visit ancient Egypt, the Americas, the Caribbean, Great Britain and Japan; you’ll meet pirates and warriors, witches andContinue readingSword of the Ronin Featured in Historical Fiction Story Bundle

The Horror You Can’t See

{Just in time for Halloween, this article has been reprinted from The Fictorians, Oct 23, 2015.} As a writer who gravitates to the dark and desolate and desperate, I often inject a syringe full of horror into my stories. “You got your horror in my fantasy!” “Oh, yeah? You got your fantasy in my horror!” This month, I’m going to talk about a technique that the best horror writers and filmmakers use masterfully—leaving things off-screen. So before this wild assertion spurs someone to argue with me, someone whose tastes prefer everything upfront and in one’s face, let me say thatContinue readingThe Horror You Can’t See

Short Stories Galore

It’s strange how a writing career propagates in waves. Just by timing and random chance, I have a whole raft of short stories coming out now and in the near future. “The Metal of a Man” appears in this month’s Electric Spec magazine. What does an aging cyborg do when he knows that parts of his body will outlive him? “Aisa’s Beast” appearing in Legends of the Dragon, Vol. 1. (Trade paperback edition available soon.) A strange, subterranean creature is drawn to a gaudy pageant of strange mortals called Dragon Con, where he is enslaved by a cruel Faerie princess. “For theContinue readingShort Stories Galore