Well, it’s con season again. Finally! My first con is a small local fantasy and SF convention, RustyCon. This will be my first time at RustyCon, and I’ve heard a ton about it over the years. I’m really excited about this. My schedule is below. If you are visiting from out of town, please remember to reserve your room. You’ll need to register for a membership. Hope to see you out! RustyCon will be a fully masked event. Proof of vaccination is mandatory, as is photo ID. Please see the website for details.     Rustycon 38 Hilton Hotel, Bellevue, WA 24-26 Sep 2021  Fri ..read more

Part One: What It Is and What It Ain’t Disclaimer: There is no “correct” way to write a novel. I keep getting asked, “How did you sell so many books?” The Short and Scrappy Guide to Novel Writing reflects what has worked for me. I’ve been asked quite a bit lately to do some writing about writing, so here we go. First things first: my five rules. With this out of the way, let’s just start at the very beginning. I want to start by defining what a novel is. Truth told, I want to redefine it, at least for the purposes of the next couple of blog posts, because we’re going to need to drill down on ..read more

So, something fun. We took a week and did a retreat to the desert. Well, not so much a retreat as a frontal assault, but the point is, we left the rainy Northwest and ended up in the desert. Some of you may remember that the desert and I don’t get along so well. I’m career Army, and like many soldiers with multiple tours, the desert and I have a contentious relationship. My “It’s Complicated” status with the desert, though, began when I attended the French Forces Desert Warfare School  at Arta Plage in the Horn of Africa, training beside the 13e DBLE, the 13th Demi-Brigade of th ..read more

So, here we are, one day post-WorldCon. Make it two; we bailed on Monday morning and headed for Scotland, where, come tomorrow, we’ll be stomping through a series of beautiful-and-allegedly-haunted-as-shit ruins east of the Cairngorms. It’s probably fine. WorldCon was pretty damned amazing. We hit Dublin running, straight into the convention on the first day. I sat on a panel on Gamelit, LitRPG, and Isekai with my good friend Elliott Kay, moderated by fantasy artist Likhain, who WENT ON TO WIN A GODDAMN HUGO AWARD THREE DAYS LATER WOO!!!! Ahem. As a writer of portal fantasy, my input on all th ..read more

This is an extension of a post I made over at Mythic Scribes in which authors were asked to explain their magic systems in five bullet points. This was fun, in no small part because with the increased role of magic in, well, The New Magic, some readers have been asking exactly how magic works in Gateskeep and the surrounding neighborhood. My magic system is pretty simple. A little background: I was raised in a Native American household, steeped in tradition, which included a strong belief in magic. There were never any “rules” to magic the way that we were taught about it; there were just thin ..read more

MisCon 32 is right around the corner. I’m scheduled as a panelist and attending pro. My schedule is at the bottom of this post. I’ll be talking worldbuilding, weapons, and violence, three subjects dear to my heart, so it should be a good time. Also, it appears that a lot of old friends from cons long past will be there. There are bourbons to be downed and stories to be caught up on. The organizers have done a hell of a thing overall. I’ve never been to MisCon, but it looks magnificent. Highlights for me at MisCon include a reading from The New Magic on Saturday the 26th at 3 PM, and a wor ..read more

I want to touch back on POV and voice again, because the last installment on voice was something of a master class. I wanted to write a post that’s a bit more basic, for those of you who are just getting started on your writing journey. This post is an introduction to narrative voice and POV. Narrative voice is the hardest thing in fiction writing. It takes a lifetime of study and practice to master. We’re going to knock out the absolute basics, here, with examples, if you give me about twenty minutes. Disclaimer: this will only put your feet in the starting blocks. If you write your entire li ..read more

THIS POST HAS SPOILERS FOR DRAGON’S TRAIL. This is a topic that has come up a few times. And frankly, I’ve been nervous to discuss it, since it’s a touchy subject. However, now that The New Magic is going through developmental editing, I was going over deleted scenes and I realized how much expository backstory I took out of these books, and I think it’s time we finally sat down and had The Talk. Today, I want to talk about sex.  And worldbuilding. Dragon’s Trail has been called “sexist” or “male daydream fantasy” by some readers–and it is, but not in the way you might expe ..read more

I’m going to do something that I usually don’t do. I’m going to write a blog post that is not intended to stir anyone up or piss anyone off. This is serious time, now. Shit just got real. By which I mean, this shit is not real. I’ve received two reviews and three messages in the past three months mentioning the possibility that I have been to the world in my series, myself. One was a rather strident and rambling email last month which I was ready to write off as a troll, untiI got another a couple of weeks ago, just about as unbalanced, and then a third this morning, much more reasoned an ..read more

Interview with author Joseph Malik This was originally posted as an interview on Freda Hansburg’s blog on 14 October 2016. 10/14/2016 Tell us about your genre. How did you come to choose it? Why does it appeal to you? I write fantasy. But . . . well, yeah. I write crossworlds, heavily researched epic fantasy political thrillers. Hard fantasy, is what some reviewers are calling it. I took a different tack on it, I guess. I don’t know that I chose it; it just seemed that nobody had done this before. My professional background is in Special Operations and strategic intelligence, and working this ..read more