The Problems with Publishing
Author Kristine Kathryn Rusch recently shared a must-read post about today's state of publishing, aptly titled Trainwreck, Fall Edition. As she explains, she tried in June to order a copy of a book she liked for her sister. However, she wouldn’t get the book until...
Five Paintings That Disappeared Without a Trace
Art and art heists seem to go hand-in-hand. No wonder then that some of the rarest masterpieces of art have disappeared at different points in history under mysterious circumstances, leaving the cognoscenti speechless to date. Only reproductions exist today, thanks to...
5 Steps for a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
First of all, thank you all for your wonderful support. I'm lucky to have such a group of awesome people in my life. I'm returning today with a post on a topic dear to my heart: writing content. 2020 has been hard on everyone. Lockdowns, restrictions, and the pandemic...
A Few Days Off
Apologies for the brief hiatus. My dad passed last week from a sudden heart attack. He was on his feet until the very last moment, and we're grateful for that. Still, the shock was great. He left no will, so my mom and I now have to go through a small forest of red...
Basing Your High-Fantasy Towns and Cities in the Real World
I wisely started the map and made the story fit. The above words, spoken by none other than J.R.R Tolkien, have been taken as sage advice by many an accomplished – or budding – fantasy writer who felt inspired to create their own world. While Tolkien, like many...
Bathing in the Middle Ages
Continuing with my last post's theme on bathing through history, this one deals specifically with bathing in the Middle Ages. While the Crusades are generally blamed for a number of things, they triggered significant advances in the West. Indeed, some scholars think...
A Brief History of Bathing
A reader of my fantasy sci-fi series, Pearseus, once joked that I have a strange fascination with showers. And it's true; I think of them as a great example of things we take for granted but are actually pretty new. In this day and age, we enjoy a lot of conveniences...
Parts Of A House With Names You Probably Didn’t Know
One of the hardest things for me is writing detailed descriptions of houses. Part of it is that I'm impatient by nature and I tend to gloss over long descriptions when reading. But part of it is also that it can be hard to write a nice description of a house without...
Girl Power and the She-cession
I once had a look at my visitors and was pleasantly surprised to discover that most of them are women. I say pleasantly because, as the father of an, ahem, energetic 4-year-old girl, I know all about girl power. Nothing pleases me more than seeing women succeed (okay,...
The Future of Barnes and Nobles
The Passive Guy recently shared a post by Jane Friedman on the future of Barnes & Noble; a topic you may remember from my earlier post, "How Amazon Destroyed Barnes & Noble." Quite frankly, Jane's post made me sad. The latest chairman, James Daunt, is credited...
Ancient Travels
I came across an interesting question on Quora the other day: What was the approximate travel time between London and Rome in the 13th century? As Frank Melling, author of "A Sixpence in the Settee," points out, this is not a simple question to answer, as it depends...
Free Online Character Name Generators
I have an unusual relationship with character names, probably because I have such a poor memory (as Electra likes to point out). Quite frankly, I don't particularly like the process of coming up with names. As the saying goes, you don't know how many people you...