When Everything You Write Is Shit: Why Young Writers Should Not Give Up

A while back, I posted a link to fanfiction I wrote when I was 14. I’m not going to do it again; I’d like to spare you from further eye-gouging opportunities, especially in the likely scenario that you’ve never read any of my stuff before. I’ve improved, I swear. I think people have this image …

The Beauty of Epic Fantasy

I‘m not exactly sure who made character-driven epic fantasy a thing. Certainly, the popularity of GRR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series might have done a lot to turn the tide from the old-fashioned epic fantasy (good vs. evil, chosen hero, ridiculously deranged villain) to the shades-of-grey, good-guys-are-bad-guys-too epics of today. I follow the …

Background: Birthplace

My upcoming novel, Birthplace, is the first book in a series about werebeasts from Filipino folklore: the aswang. It is also, incidentally, the first book I’ve written that isn’t in the epic fantasy genre…it is paranormal YA. A sort of long, kind of bloody, definitely M-rated paranormal YA. The working title of this book was “My Anti-Twilight.” I’ll leave …

Old Age

This is a scheduled blog post. I’m supposed to be out this weekend, exploring the Purcell mountains and the Okanagan with my family, so if a bear hasn’t eaten me or something yet, I should have turned 30 by now. 30 is a crazy number for me. I dealt with a lot of depression in …