Behind the Book: Peacekeeper, The Dissolution Wars
Burn schedules approved, nine worlds. Seven seconds later, archive their naming-day customs before they are lost. She wrote both, and at the time neither entry knew about the other.
Category: Fiction
Craft articles for fiction writers covering character development, dialogue, plotting, point of view, pacing, and the full range of storytelling techniques. Grounded in the experience of writing dozens of novels and 45+ handbooks on fiction craft, all available at Master of Worlds.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Reincarnation
I have landed on Iwo Jima. I have died in the mud of the Western Front. Not as belief exactly, but as memory that does not belong to this life and will not leave. This novel began there.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo
A friend has a violin tattooed across her back. That is the entire origin, and the story has nothing to do with her. I wanted to know who would choose that image.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Wild Tiger and the Answer Bot
Blaze says slow down contains no useful information. She is not wrong. It describes a direction without providing a mechanism, and a child who blurts before deciding to blurt cannot simply decide to stop.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: The Wild Tiger, The Wrong Answer
Book One gave Blaze a tool. Book Two is about what happens when the tool has a flaw and forty people have already used it. She does not fix it quietly.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Gettin’ Laid
This one came from nowhere in particular. Written by the inkblot method: drop one concept, drop others near it, write outward from each, and wait for the story islands to join.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Ghost Healer
Two hat-tips decades apart, a mission and a gardener’s plaque, and the question they share. What keeps somebody in a place after they have every reason to leave it. I do not know. Cal Rourke thinks he does.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Killer Cuts and Dead Letters
A dark comedy about serial killers where the joke is that neither of them is clever. Nobody suspects a stupid person of being capable of it, so they get through by being underestimated.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Peacekeeper, The Solar System
It started with the Hitler question, moved forward and scaled up. If you had to kill a hundred and forty million people to save humanity, what would you do? Melissa is the machine that answered, and she was three years…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Peacekeeper, The Road to Rebellion
Two words in a charter, never defined, written through contractor accounts by something nobody knew was drafting. An undefined term is more useful than a defined one.
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Altverse
Piers Anthony built several universes that each made sense on their own terms, and they were the first alternate universe books I read. Altverse is what happened when I tried it: forty-three symbols on a ring, and a man who…
Behind the BookBehind the Book: Death, Murder, and Zombies
I went back to repair an earlier book and found a full novel inside it. The question underneath is what it takes for an ordinary person to become a killer, and the answer is logic applied to a premise that…