Last weekend, Memorial Day 2019, I was unable to attend MisCon in Missoula, Montana. But I was there by proxy, represented by numerous friends, colleagues, and B-Cubed Press. The publisher of B-Cubed is my co-author, co-editor, and best friend Bob … Continue reading
Today I rerun an essay from my Facebook page, originally published about three years ago, when I was still a Methodist, attending a church undergoing severe upheaval. Our music minister, Bill White, was fired suddenly, for no apparent reason. Below … Continue reading
Paradise by Chaz Brenchley A miracle may cure cancer in one teenage boy, but can it cure a community…? They call it Paradise: an inner-city danger zone, starved of resources and starved of hope. Run-down housing, run-down lives. Then comes … Continue reading
We’ve covered a lot of territory in this series of blogs. This week, I’d like to sum up by revisiting some ideas that seem, to me, critical to writing a fictional religion or writing fictionally about a real religion that … Continue reading
As you go about creating a faith for your fictional world or portraying an existing faith the question may arise as to how unique a particular faith is as a feature of the culture(s) you’re positing. If you’re aiming to … Continue reading
This is the question that came up at an online Catholic writer’s convention several years ago: Can you write positively or neutrally about other religious beliefs without betraying your own? This is a real fear among some writers with strong … Continue reading
I did a Q & A a while back for an online writer’s conference on writing faith for fiction. The participants asked a panel of writers questions about how we handled the subject. Over the next several blogs, I thought … Continue reading
Neutrality, Ambiguity, Humor, and Affection An aspiring writer once asked me how he might write about religion “safely.” He had collected an array of anecdotes and stories from his business dealings but was afraid that if he fictionalized them, he’d … Continue reading
The Straw Religion A Straw Man is an imaginary construct that embodies everything the writer doesn’t like about something, someone, or some group. By nature, it requires gross a generalization that attaches the particular to a whole. In the context … Continue reading
I deal with religion, magic, faith, or some sort of spiritual belief system in most of my books and quite a few of my short stories. If not the main thread, these form at least a subtle part of the … Continue reading
