- Why It’s Good to Buy Books from Stores
A brief explanation of why you’ll do your favorite author more good by purchasing their books from a bricks-and-mortar store than buying them online. - Multicultural Fantasy
A (now regrettably out-of-date) list of fantasy that draws substantially on real-world cultures other than Celtic, Norse, and feudal European. - Fantasy Adaptations
Another out-of-date list, this one of fantasy that adapts a specific pre-existing narrative. - Learning to See Through Photos
How I became a photographer, and what it has taught me.
Although the industry has changed a great deal since I sold my first novel, there are still enough similarities for me to leave these essays here: a narrative of how I sold the book and what happened afterward. (Not a horror story! Just a primer, since there are few resources that describe what to expect after an editor offers you money.)
- My First Novel
- The Wind-Up
- The Agent Waltz
- And Then There Was Haggling
- If at First You Do Succeed, Revise, Revise Again
- The Production Process
- One Year Later
I’ve published five nonfiction articles at Strange Horizons, on topics of potential interest to fantasy writers. (If you want to know the deep, dark truth, three of them are repurposed from papers I wrote during my undergraduate and graduate education.)
- “Mesoamerican Calendars”
- “The Logic of Sacrifice”
- “Bull-Leaping in Bronze Age Crete”
- “Ireland’s Ancient Code”
- “That Fairy-Tale Feel: A Folkloric Approach to Meredith Ann Pierce’s The Darkangel”
And speaking of undergraduate papers, here’s one I wrote for an archaeology tutorial, shared as part of my re-read through the Elfquest comic book series.
I have also made three guest appearances on the Writing Excuses podcast, discussing various topics:
