Writer/Reader/Listener Blog

My mother used to tell me fantastical stories about how when I was 4 years old, I’d rush home from Kindergarten with WILD stories about my day. Breathless, I could barely get out a syllable, as my mother tried to coach me and talk me down from…

What makes some stories easy to slip into and others more like homework? Good writing is the obvious answer, but even the experts pearl-clutch when someone treads on their pet structures or rules. In this post, let’s consider good writing as …

The best sports writing, in terms of depth and lyricism, focuses on baseball and golf. Neither sport is known for its non-stop action, which is exactly why they are so suited to writing. They allow time to explore, to ponder, to sift through alterna…

Well, UNTOLD TALES has been airing audio science fiction short stories from almost 5 years now and we recently broadcast our 100th episode Here is a question for all our listeners. Which episode is your favorite? Do you have a favorite type of sto…

Rewriting. That word is a bit vague until you approach it from a writer’s perspective. From there it gets even foggier. It can be a wipe-the-slate-start-over command, a reorganization, or focus-honing of the draft as it exists. To be clear, Re…

I know people who think that being a writer is easy. They are idiots. I say that because if they had ever tried to actually be a writer, they’d know it wasn’t easy and so they’d stop being idiots. I’m all about letting people…

One of the worst things that writers do is when they TELL a reader instead of SHOWING them. In particular, I hate it when an author tells me how a character ‘feels’. They’re happy, or sad, or tired, or angry. By doing so, the au…

Ponder Sisyphus. Doomed to push a massive boulder up a steep hill, only to have it roll down again. Every time. Every. Time. What’s that got to do with creativity? First: Creativity is hard work. It may seem easy, and we may pretend it …

With the recent advent of AI regenerative systems, many people have become frightened that advances in AI will result in chaos at many levels. Some fear that it will become impossible to tell the difference between AI-generated information (text or …

            Jason is a bright young man who can draw brilliantly. He has an intuitive grasp of perspective and framing that lends itself well to graphic novel projects, though he has so far focu…