There is only so much you can do with bubble gum and duct tape before things get silly.

Writers take great care when writing about highly technical or specialized fields, but often gloss over the accuracy of blue collar or working class characters and situations. But presenting a factory accurately is just as important as presenting an emergency room accurately.

One of the biggest problems writers have is not knowing when or how to use dialogue tags. Tags can bog down dialogue in a story. Excessive use of tags can actually make it harder to follow a conversation. Tags should only be used to help identify who is speaking or to provide additional insight not already conveyed in the conversation itself. The dialogue should in most cases be able to convey the emotion of the scene without hitting the reader over the head with extra dialogue tags.

Everything I need to know about writing speculative fiction I learned from roleplaying games…

I have a confession. I suck at spelling. Or more accurately, my fingers suck at spelling. I can spell just fine.

I have to confess. I am always rather amused when someone posts a thread claiming they have created a new genre when in fact all they have done is write a paranormal romance or urban fantasy. Too often, people get lost in the “gimmicks” in their story instead of focusing on the story’s actual theme. 99% of the time, the issue is not that the author has created a new genre, but has a significant lack of genre literacy and simply does not understand the genres available. The other 1% of the time, I swear the author just wants attention. This isn’t a problem unique to indies. Big publishers often deliberately mislabel books not because they don’t know any better, but because they want to capitalize on certain demographics.