When I think of serial fiction, the first thing that comes to mind are those old black-and-white serials that used to play in theaters before the main attraction. However, serial fiction has a longer tradition in the written word than the moving picture. Writers from as early as the 19th century made their livings by [...]

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My apologies to everyone who was unable to post over the last couple days. It seems there was an issue with the anti-spam plugin. I’ve disabled the plugin until the I can get the issue resolved or regress to the last working version.
Talking about superheroes naturally leads to a discussion of comic books. Comic books [...]

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I thought that a great way to kick off the new Pens & Swords would be to reprint the following article I wrote for a debate topic on Helium.
The publishing world, much like Hollywood, tends to play it safe. When a book becomes a bestseller, not only does the publisher seek to squeeze more of [...]

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Prologues are developing into a pet peeve of mine. I’m reading Knife of Dreams, and Jordan once again starts off with a 100-page prologue. Why wasn’t this a chapter?
Somewhere along the line, I came up with a pretty specific definition of what a prologue was. It is not based on any dictionary definition, as the [...]

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I’ve only been to one author reading. I think I listened to one book on tape/CD. I didn’t do a reading for Maiden. Reactions and opinions seem to be mixed on the benefit of readings. One of the events I did for speech and debate in college was interpretative reading (think acting without using body [...]

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