historical fantasy

Thinking of a new way to write

You know I have a lot more ideas for stories than I’ll ever have time to write. So I’ve been thinking, during idle times like going to the grocery store or walking the dog: maybe I need a new way to write long fiction. One that acknowledges that we’re distracted all the time, that our […]

The end is near

I wrote that I will never again say “things can’t get worse.” Because they did, and continue to. COVID-19 cases are increasing again in China, Japan, the U.K. and elsewhere.  And the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine grinds on.  I find this particularly affecting, as I am married to a Ukrainian-Canadian, and I wrote […]

Summer solstice sample

A special celebration from 1,428 years ago The Bones of the Earth, Part 1: Initiation Rites For the first day of summer, the summer solstice, here is a sample from another summer solstice, which I described in The Bones of the Earth, Part 1: Initiation Rites. This scene takes place on the night before the […]

It's been a productive pandemic—I mean, summer

Without belittling the importance of the COVID-19 pandemic, I can say that I’ve had a productive few months. Since March, I have: finished the second Dark Age novel, The Children of the Seventh Son rewritten the second Hawaiian Storm full-length novel, Dead Man Lying outlined a completely new novel, a near-future dystopian thriller. What you […]

Ancient history is bloody

  Fantasy lovers, despair not. I’m making good progress with the sequel to my first-published novel, The Bones of the Earth. As regular readers will know, it’s titled The Triumph of the Sky. It continues the story of Javor, the young Sklavenic man who was pulled into a strange war he could not have imagined. […]

Six-sentence Sunday: The Bones of the Earth

Once upon a time, when blogging was still young and the World Wide Web was comparatively innocent, there was a thing called Six Sentence Sunday. During this epoch, authors would publish six-sentence samples of their books, either published or works-in-progress, onto their blogs on Sunday morning, along with a link to a central site called […]

Kupailo girl solstice

Today is Midsummer’s, the Summer Solstice, long regarded as a special day by humanity.  This year, the full moon was just a few nights ago—also an auspicious time for mystics and sky-watchers.  The Bones of the Earth, my first published novel, begins at midnight on the Summer Solstice, under a full moon. That coincidence does […]

Speedbumps on the road to writing

Sometimes when writing, I feel like I’m just rolling nicely. The word count climbs, I describe setting and action, important events flow onto the pages and then, WHAM! I’m stopped by some tiny detail that I need to research. I like the fiction I write to contain as much fact as possible, whether it’s a […]