Every genre has its own contract with the reader, and breaking it carelessly loses them. These how-to guides cover writing fairy tales, superhero fiction, mystery, science fiction, horror, and more — each with the conventions that genre’s readers expect.
fiction writingA magic system with no rules is just a plot convenience; a kingdom with no economy has no stakes; a culture with no history is a theme park. World building is the foundation everything else stands on, not set dressing.…
Character DevelopmentEvery other genre borrows the real world; fantasy builds its world from nothing, which means you are always doing two jobs at once, telling the story and constructing the place it happens. Most fantasy novels die where those jobs collide.…
fiction writingI have written civilization-ending apocalypses and survived Northridge and multiple wildfire evacuations, so I know destruction from both the keyboard and the evacuation route, and the gap between the two is exactly what separates effective catastrophe from forgettable spectacle. Here…
AI WritingRomance is the single largest category in commercial fiction, bigger than mystery and thriller combined, and it rewards writers who understand what readers actually want instead of what writers assume they want. Most advice misses that entirely. Here is what…
fiction writingMystery is the biggest commercial fiction category after romance, with thriller it claims about 35 percent of adult fiction sales. These readers move fast and spend real money, and they can feel a cheat. Most advice treats the genre as…
Genre Writing GuidesFrom ancient oral traditions to modern horror, ghost stories tap the same deep nerve: the fear of death, the question of after, the suspicion that the line between living and dead is thinner than we admit. I work in this…
Book CoachingI have spent forty-five years writing one fantasy series, Peacekeeper, longer than I have done almost anything else. It taught me more about world-building and magic systems than any craft book could. Here is what nearly half a century inside…
Genre Writing GuidesI own all fifteen White Wolf limited editions of the Eternal Champion, and Moorcock justified every dollar: a multiverse so interconnected that reading it feels like grasping a cosmology instead of finishing a series. You jump between Elric, Corum, and…
Genre Writing GuidesA rock star once called me with a whole post-apocalyptic world running on sound waves, vivid, passionate, and completely unbuilt. That is the typical sci-fi client: a dazzling vision and no framework to turn it into a novel. World-building, internal…
fiction writingOne reviewer abandoned a historical novelist forever over a single anachronism: a spinning wheel in 13th-century England. One wrong object in one character's hands, and trust evaporated. While writing a novel about the Roman civil war between Vespasian and Vitellius,…
fiction writingTelling a complete story in under 1,000 words is brutal, and that is exactly why flash fiction teaches you to write. With no room to hide behind backstory or description, every word has to pull weight or the story breaks.…
Amazon & KDPScience fiction hands you more freedom than any genre: invent worlds, technologies, even physics, then watch what they do to the people inside them. That freedom is also the trap, since a world without discipline collapses into noise. Here is…
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