Science Fiction & Fantasy

Most people hate the sound of their own voice. I was never that kid. My parents gave me my very own cassette recorder at the age five or six. When I wasn’t listening to read-along Alice in Wonderland, I would lock myself in the bathroom and record inspirational speeches about how important it was for [...]

I recently asked my circle of friends (both in person and on the interwebs): “What do authors owe us?”
It’s an age-old, deceptively simple question that should have a simple answer, right? But the further I delved into the nuances of the answers I received, the muddier the waters became.
As social media continues to amplify the [...]

This year marks my twentieth year in the book industry. Exactly half of my life.
In 1996, I graduated from USC with a degree in Chemistry. I immediately went out and got a second job at a bookstore. (I was already assistant and promotional manager at the local movie theater.) I haven’t left the publishing industry [...]

Saturday morning cartoons began sometime in the 1960s and ran until the fall of 2014. For over fifty years, from roughly 8 AMuntil noon, children in the United States sat in observance of this weekly ritual with an anticipation second only to Christmas morning.
Being one of these children myself, I speak from experience.
Every [...]

Book reviewers fascinate me.
My first official publishing gig was as a book reviewer for the local free press in Murfreesboro, TN. Every two weeks, I turned in five to eight hundred words about my favorite author or tome du jour. Not that it mattered; I didn’t get paid either way. But I got published! (And, [...]

“Of all the places I’ve seen, this is the fairest of them all.”
—Regina, Once Upon a Time
My favorite required reading book in high school was assigned not in English class, but history. Mr. Stafford was a bit of a progressive history teacher (for South Carolina)—we lucky honor students watched Amadeus and A Man [...]

Sometimes, I read reviews people have written of my work. Sometimes I don’t. It’s no big deal. I do like to make comments on people’s blogs thanking them for their time—they do appreciate it, and I’m prepared to take the bad with the good. I recently found a perverse pleasure in responding to people who [...]

I always find myself stumped when I’m put on a panel or asked in an interview about contemporary adaptations of “original” fairy tales. Fairy stories began in Ancient Egypt, Greece, and China. Men and women started collecting these stories and writing them down in Italy, and then France, all before the Brothers Grimm. Whether the [...]

Call them folk tales, wonder tales, or fairy stories: Fairy tales have a history of adaptation that was born long before some Italian wrote one down on paper in the 1500s. They have celebrated renaissance, preached religious values, and outlined basic moral behavior, with a little adventure, magic, and witchery thrown in for entertainment value. [...]

Back in the heyday of the science classes I adored, I learned something very important about the color white: it isn’t actually a color. It’s the combination of all the colors in the visible light spectrum.  Now I’m talking light here, not pigment. Mix all your paints together and you get [...]