(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) If you listen to advertisements, sleeping on the wrong kind of mattress and pillow dooms you to a lifetime of back pain and under-slept misery. To be fair, there is … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Much like childbearing, sleeping is a fundamentally biological process with a lot of culture built around it. Even the biological part can be treated as fair game for worldbuilding, of … Continue reading
I recently read a column in CodeLikeaGirl (on Medium) in which Kira Leigh eloquently expressed the sheer scariness of pursuing a career as a freelancer. I was compelled to respond because while Kira is fairly new at freelancing, I’ve been … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) We often like to think of religions as clear-cut things, with distinct boundaries between them. In reality, they’re often anything but; they borrow and copy and change and blend, in … Continue reading
I recently had to exorcise, er, fire a client. One I’d been working with for years. I have written three complete novels for this fellow, rewritten a fourth and outlined a fifth. The novel we were working on when we … Continue reading
Sara Stamey’s journeys include treasure hunting and teaching scuba in the Caribbean and Honduras; backpacking Greece and New Zealand; operating a nuclear reactor; and owning a farm in Southern Chile. Sara Stamey’s novel Islands, now in ebook from Book View Cafe, is set in the Caribbean and packed with both adventure and intricate characters and plot. It’s also romantic suspense with a drop of psychic wonder. “An archeologist investigating petroglyphs ends up diving for sunken treasure and investigating a cult murder.”
Continue reading(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) In creating a fictional polytheism, it’s useful to have a sense of what kinds of gods are possible. The honest answer to this is “anything you like.” There’s nothing inherently … Continue reading
You will have noticed that I’m interested in how old stuff gets reused. In a region crammed full of old stuff, this is continually happening. Upcycling old houses so they have flush toilets, repaving the Roman roads so that the … Continue reading
(This post is part of my Patreon-supported New Worlds series.) Polytheism is everywhere in secondary-world fantasy. While some settings feature a monotheistic church of some kind — usually one modeled on Christianity, as the word “church” implies — there’s a … Continue reading
My favorite clients are the ones that ask questions, because it means they’re curious enough about the process of writing that they want to understand it. Those questions may be specific: ”On page 50 of my manuscript, why did you … Continue reading
