[by Shannon Roberts]
Science fiction, as a genre, has often struggled to be taken seriously. Oh, it’s garnered some respect, a few classics, and a bucketful of noteworthy authors, but how seriously are we expected to take a class of fiction that still doesn’t even warrant its own section in too many bookstores?
[by Shannon Roberts]
Initially I modeled my work after one of my (at the time) favorite bloggers and web-comic writers, Jerry Holkins. I started to fold in some Terry Pratchett and I sampled from […]
George R.R.Martin’s A Game of Thrones turns 20 this month! In honor of twenty years in print, and a hugely successful twenty years at that, here’s a breakdown of the first 50 pages of the book that started it all.
Aside from the prologue, the first 50 pages of ‘A Game of Thrones’ is divided into five […]
Even if you haven’t seen many Westerns, you’ve probably absorbed this knowledge via cultural osmosis—I certainly had.
Fortunately, the first Western I was privileged to watch was The Magnificent Seven (if a cowboy movie based on […]
[by Shannon Roberts]
Questions. Motives. Clues. Red herrings. Villains. Suspense.
All of these are elements in any good mystery. And all of them should be elements in your novel—whether it be science fiction, literary fiction, family or historical drama, horror, romance, or something else entirely.
Any good story is driven by […]
