• Mental Telepathy In Science Fiction

    I’m currently working on a story of about 23,000 words (that makes it a “novella” or “novelette,” depending on your definition) that has to do with humans from Earth who […]

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  • The Pikes Peak Writers Conference–2019

    The Pikes Peak Writers Conference for 2019, held yearly in Colorado Springs, was last weekend, May 3-5, 2019.  Here’s a few impressions and takeaways I gleaned from the conference.  Not […]

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  • Space Opera: A Definition

    I have had, over the past 20 years or so that I’ve been trying to write science fiction, and on one or two occasions, to answer the question, “What is […]

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  • TNR vs. Courier; Pica vs. Elite

    Do you remember “pica” and/or “elite” type on typewriters?  Way back when we didn’t have personal computers, and everything we wrote was either by hand or on a typewriter, we […]

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  • “House Made of Dawn”: Review and Commentary

    I’ve just completed reading N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn.  (It was awarded the prize in 1969.)  A beautifully written book, it is what I would […]

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  • The Hardest Part About Writing

    This particular post is directed largely to my writing friends, though many of you who are not writers—that is, writers in a more or less full-time sense—might get a similar take-away […]

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  • Stakes and Motivation

    A couple of weeks ago I sent the first 50 pages of the manuscript of my first science-fiction novel to a professional editor for evaluation.  It had been read by a number […]

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  • The Prime Directive

    If you are a fan of the television and movie Star Trek series, and dating from the earliest series of programs which are usually called “Star Trek, The Original Series,” then you […]

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  • Challenged

    A few weeks ago I was standing in line at a local restaurant, and in front of me were several women from a home for the mentally ill.  I presume they’ve […]

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  • Beauty In Outer Space

    One of my three science fiction novels is about a group of explorers who land on a distant planet in an attempt to see if it could be colonized by people […]

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  • It’s A Two-Way Street

    I’ve been submitting queries about my trilogy of science-fiction novels to agents and a few editors for about fifteen years now (possibly more), and I would say that probably around half of […]

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  • Drowning In Plastic–An Update

    In 2013, I posted a blot entry about how the Earth is drowning in plastic, and we should all be willing to do something to help minimize the problem.  In my […]

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