Category: Guest Posts

The Truth Inside the Lie – Eileen Kernaghan

The Alchemy of Historical Fiction When I begin a historical fantasy set in a real time and place, I have an unspoken contract with my reader. I’m free to create new adventures for real historical figures – events and situations that are not recorded in the history books. But I can’t – or at least I shouldn’t – relocate them in times and places where history tells us they couldn’t possibly have been. When I write in the cracks and empty spaces of documented history, I try not to change the things that we know to be true. My research…

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The Truth Inside the Lie – Andy Rogers

Let the Voyeurs In The most transformative lessons in my life are the ones that make me consider the sort of person I want to be. I’m talking about, ‘Who am I?’ in those I’m-all-alone-and-there-ain’t-nobody-that-can-ever-find-me-muhaha kind of situations. How do I truly want myself to behave? We all garb ourselves in various personas when we are subject to the perceptions of others. I hope for myself that I make reasonable choices with regards to how I behave in public. But at my core, what kind of person do I wish to be when I’m completely safe from scrutiny? I think…

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The Truth Inside the Lie – Matthew Hughes

What Would Winston Churchill Say? I spent most of my adult life as a freelance speechwriter, writing mainly for CEOs (they don’t mind spending extravagant amounts on themselves) and the occasional politician.  I didn’t know I was a born speechwriter until I wrote my first speech, while working as assistant to a Member of Parliament.  I discovered I had the rare knack of being able to hear a speaker’s voice and speech patterns in my head, then write the text so that the words sounded natural. Mostly, I wrote bread-and-butter jobs, an endless succession of Chamber of Commerce luncheons and…

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The Truth Inside the Lie – Noah Chinn

Prisoners of Gravity Next week on Second Nature… If those words ring a bell, you remember one of the best weekly TV interview shows a kid could have growing up. In 1989, TVOntario launched what was one of the most unusual interview show in Canadian television. It interviewed authors. Science fiction and fantasy authors. Keep in mind this was at a time where fandom wasn’t quite where it is today. Today conventions have hit a kind of mainstream critical mass that didn’t quite exist in the same way 20 years ago. This show was a glorious celebration of geek culture…

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The Truth Inside the Lie – Nina Munteanu

The Battle of Grunwald and the Fate of the Teutonic Knights My part in this piece of history really started sometime in 2008 with the vision of an incredible image by Croatian artist Tomislav Tikulin. It was the image of a magnificent knight, standing in a war-littered mire and gazing up, questioning, at the vaulted ceiling of a drowned cathedral. A great light shone upon the knight in streams of white gold. It sent my imagination soaring with thoughts of chivalry, adventure and intrigue. Who was this knight? With that image imprinted inside me, the next nexus moment came when…

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The Truth Inside the Lie – Ira Nayman

Rituals In social situations, writers and psychiatrists have a similar problem of perception. People become wary when talking to psychiatrists for fear that the shrink will analyze everything they say. In a similar vein, people are wary of talking to writers for fear that they will become (unsympathetic) characters in a story. Knowing this, whenever I used to meet people for the first time, I would tell them not to worry, that I wouldn’t use anything they told me in my writing. This is the story of how my attitude on this issue changed. I was talking on the phone…

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The Truth Inside the Lie – Joshua Simpson

Anyone who knows me in real life would not be shocked to learn the world I created for Warpworld was one rich in forests and water, populated by a class of independent mariners, featuring a female protagonist who rebels against the constraints of her gender and caste. As foreign as S’ora may seem to the uninitiated, to me it is the world I know and love, only set on a slightly different stage. It was simply fortunate happenstance that the world I knew contrasted so perfectly with the world and characters Josh had already created when we first sat down…

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The Truth Inside the Lie

“Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.” – Stephen King, IT If there’s one question writers of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and their many sub-genres are asked by readers it is likely some permutation of “How do you make all this stuff up?” While all writers of fiction, by definition, make stuff up, it is far easier to understand the origin of stories that take place in the world we know. But when the stories involve strange lands, creatures, magic, or even alternate versions of our own…

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Women of Character – Laura Lee Connery, The Real Girl On Fire

Today we talk to professional stunt woman Laura Lee Connery, but before I jump into our final Women of Character interview, just a few reminders! 1. Our 10-stop review tour begins July 15th. Hosted by Tribute Books, you can read the full schedule here and find out how to win $25 in an Amazon gift card or PayPal cash. 2. Check out the cover for Wasteland Renegades, (coming soon!), and you’ll have another chance at a $25 Amazon gift card. Just in time to re-stock your bookshelf for summer reading. Now, back to our incredibly awesome Woman of Character already…

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Women of Character – Leslie MacKeen, Cultural Theorist With a Heart

In Warpworld, Cultural Theorists travel across the dimensions to explore new worlds and blend in with Outer civilizations. It’s a dangerous job and only a handful of People are smart enough, or tough enough, to do it. On our world, travel to some parts of the globe is still considered exotic, glamorous, and, yes, sometimes dangerous. Leslie MacKeen, has traveled to many of those places, not to steal vita but to lend a helping hand. Fittingly, I met Leslie in 2003, in Costa Rica, while she was backpacking from the tip of South America to her home in the United…

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