Roger Floyd's Website

Well, they say that rules are made to be broken.  Actually, rules are made to be followed and broken only at your own (and possibly someone else’s) risk.  This is certainly true in writing, though the risks of breaking the writing rules are somewhat different from breaking the rules for, say, driving.  Break the driving…

There’s a slow but inexorable shift taking place in writing.  Actually this shift encompasses more than just writing because it has to do with information in all its forms and configurations.  I’m talking about the manner in which we store information. It used to be that books were the main storage unit in keeping information from disappearing. …

It’s good to be back at the computer now after having been away for a couple of weeks.  Last week I took a trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park, located in northeastern New Mexico.  The trip was one of the Sierra Club’s service trips that help local areas promote some aspect of good environmental…

I’ve been hard at work for the past month on the rough draft of the third in my trilogy of science-fiction novels.  I call the series “The Anthanian Imperative,”  and each book gets an identifying color.  The first is “Blue,” the second “Green,” and the third, “Red.”  The colors are actually integral to the plot of each book. …

I noticed a week or so ago on the website Squidoo a list of the top ten books read in the last fifty years.  They gave a listing of the top books sold in the world in the last fifty years, and they assume this means those books were the top fifty read.  I suspect…

Have you ever read a book, especially a new one, then wrote a review of it?  With the ease of publication by electronic means now available that results in new books popping up on Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc., the chances that someone you know will have a novel or a non-fiction book that you can purchase on…

Have you ever heard the old expression, “If it isn’t one thing, it’s something else.”?  Writing a book, actually writing anything, is a good way to come up against that expression on a regular basis.  I’ve written two science-fiction novels now, and am hotly in the process of writing the rough draft of a third.  (They form a trilogy,…

I’ve been reading Tea Obreht’s book, The Tiger’s Wife, this past week, and it’s brought up a point about writing I’ve been thinking about ever since I got into this business.  First of all, though, a little about the book. I’d heard a lot about the book over the past year, so when I was at…

I just got back from attending a writers conference at the University of New Mexico, and here are a few thoughts about it.  Just a one-day affair with a box lunch, I heard from a couple of editors and a few agents and authors.  The most significant part of the conference from my point of…

There’s an unusual aspect of the English language (and perhaps other languages as well) that I’ve noticed the past several months.  I’ve identified a concept we need a good word for because we don’t have one.  The problem I’m talking about is the terminology for taking pictures digitally. Back when pictures were first taken, images were recorded…

I’ve come to the conclusion that becoming a writer is a risky business.  The important word here is “business,” not so much the word “risky,” though that’s a part of it.  After all, writing is a business, as much as accounting or medicine or law or installing air conditioning.  And while all those vocations have certain…

I’m always surprised at the things that go on in our galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy.  In the past year or so, in the reading I do sporadically about the stars and planets and the cosmos, I ‘ve run across several articles about what has turned out to be the most common type of star in…