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I have written and sold one collaborative novel, and I'm in the middle of writing another, so I have some experience in this sub-specialty of our craft. Once you've gotten past the "Let's write a novel together!  It'll be fun/great/a ball!" stage, reality sets in....

This is a combined public service announcement and post. My first novel will be published in October by Baen Books.  The title is 1636: The Devil's Opera, and it's a collaboration with Eric Flint. The cover-illustration by the great Tom Kidd-is here. Pre-order from...

"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!" -  Rudyard Kipling Every writer does things a little bit differently, and that's just as true of building/creating characters as it is of any other task in the writer's...

This is a very different article than I had planned to post.  As I write this, it is the day after a very unsane (as opposed to insane) young man named Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and started shooting people.  By the...

So, once you have the work started, how do you keep the words flowing? Sometimes, of course, you don't have that problem.  Sometimes you have to hustle to keep up with the flow. But sometimes, eh, you might have to encourage things a little.  This isn't going to be an...

What do you do when your brainchild is stillborn?  What do you do when the story you've spent months-years-in crafting and writing, the story you've almost literally sweated blood over, the story you love more than all your other literary children . . . Just . . ....