I recently finished Twelve Months, the latest Dresden Files novel, and it got me thinking about a piece of advice Jim Butcher often gives: don’t go easy on your characters. Their conflict drives the story forward. I translate this to mean: stop being so nice to your characters. In describing his series, Jim Butcher has said…
Congratulations to those who responded to last month’s newsletter regarding who sang the song with the lyrics: “time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future…”. The song was “Fly Like An Eagle”, so the correct answer was the Steve Miller Band. My wife tells me Seal had a version of the song too, so…
There’s an old song with the lyrics “time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future…” (bonus points if you can guess what song and group it’s from). But I definitely get that feeling with the start of 2026. We’re already more than halfway through the first month! I’ve heard that you shouldn’t wish people…
I almost titled this newsletter “I fought the law (Murphy’s) and the law (Murphy’s) won.” A couple of weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon, my son’s car broke down on his way to work. It was too late to tow it to a dealer, so we had it towed home, then had it towed to…
Greetings! It’s been a month since we last connected, and let me tell you, it has been quite the month! Toward the end of October, I was planning on finishing a Mechhaven novella, but for a variety of reasons I just couldn’t get it done, so instead of fighting the muses, I switched gears to…
I recently finished Twelve Months, the latest Dresden Files novel, and it got me thinking about a piece of advice Jim Butcher often gives: don’t go easy on your characters. Their conflict drives the story forward. I translate this to mean: stop being so nice to your characters. In describing his series, Jim Butcher has said…