In 2007, I heard an interview with a guy named Scott Sigler on one of the many writer podcasts that I listen to. The things he was saying about publishing, about podcasting, about the way that new writers have to work extra hard to get out there and let their audiences find them, all this really struck a chord in me as a writer with a book coming out soon. Scott is one of the pioneers of fiction podcasting.  He started out some years ago with a mass market publishing deal for his novel Earthcore, a deal which subsequently fellContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #42 – Scott Sigler

If you’ve been reading science fiction for any length of time, you know the name of Joe Haldeman, one of the Elder Masters of science fiction. He’s the author of numerous novels, but the one I know, and the one he’s best known for, is The Forever War, a story about how war changes the soldier so completely that he can never go back to the way things were. With two long, slogging wars still ongoing, today’s reality makes the book as current now as it was near the close of the Vietnam era. I remember this book as oneContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #41 – Joe Haldeman

Surrounded by glowing green aliens, strings of eerie, phosphorescent green Xmas lights, platters of snackables, and a unique beverage that could probably peel the paint off ’65 Buick without anyone noticing, including the Buick, I happened to meet a fellow in a cowboy hat named Tom Trumpinski. It was one of the numerous room parties at World Con, and this room looked like a landing site for the UFO faithful. Turned out it was a party hosted by a group lobbying for a future World Con to be held off-planet. As so often happens at such parties, we struck upContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #31 – Tom Trumpinski

Nebula Award-winning author Catherine Asaro is one of those writers who have made the transition from a career in hard science to writing hard science fiction. She blends strong female characters, romance, and hard SF into stories that have kept readers coming back for twenty novels to date.  But even within the staunchly rational and quantifiable boundaries of her training and earlier profession as a theortical physicist and academician, there was a deep well of creativity that spans music and dance as well as a writing. That creativity quickly becomes evident in her books and in our conversation.

I first became aware of Mur Lafferty via the podosphere. I ran across her I Should Be Writing and Geek-Fu Action Grip (sadly, now gone) podcasts on iTunes, and, like many thousands of other writers out there, enjoyed discovering that the worries, the angst, the ups and downs that go along with writing are all pretty much universal, along with the personal pleasure of encountering another writer who enjoys the same kind of geeky pastimes as me. I heard one of her short stories “City Talkers” on Escape Pod, a podcast for science fiction short stories, and thought it wasContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #7 – Mur Lafferty

I first became aware of the name of Richard Dansky way back when I was playing Vampire: The Masquerade. His name was on a fair number of those supplement books that every gamer just has to have. Since those days, he’s moved on to other venues, but stayed primarily within the game industry. Writing for video games is generally more lucrative than writing for tabletop pen-and-paper games, just in case you potential writers out there didn’t know. However, I’m finding that there are a lot of writers out there who got their first paying gigs writing for roleplaying and/or videoContinue readingAuthor Interview Series #4 – Richard Dansky